Tag Archives: Douglas Boyd

EIF: Rusalka

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Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Retiring EIF director Fergus Linehan has identified residencies as a key ingredient in reducing the carbon footprint of the industry, and the presence of Garsington Opera and the Philharmonia Orchestra in Edinburgh at the start of his last programme is part of that. The suggestion must be that the Buckinghamshire company could become a regular partner of the Festival in the way that Glyndebourne was 75 years ago.

This is a big thing for Garsington as well as Edinburgh, as making work for a big proscenium arch indoor stage is new to them, and it will be hoping that such a showcase may lead to further outings for this production as well as more new work travelling to Scotland. Edinburgh has seen many visually stunning opera productions from European companies (Turin’s Boheme five years ago springs instantly to mind), and the good news is that director Jack Furness and designer Tom Piper’s Rusalka can stand happily in such company.

Regular visits by Garsington might also mean the frequent return of Natalya Romaniw, as the company has nurtured the career of the Swansea soprano, and that would also be no bad thing. She was cheered to the rafters by the opening night audience – acclaim that was matched only by the reception for homecoming conductor Douglas Boyd.

Romaniw is absolutely at the peak of her powers, both vocally and as an actor. Furness and Piper have incorporated aerial artists into the watery world of the spirit and her cohorts, and there is a fair amount of crossover in the onstage action, for Romaniw on her own as well as with the three nymphs, Marlena Devoe, Heather Lowe and Stephanie Wake-Edwards. Often ankle-deep in water, the whole cast seem to revel in the elemental aspects of the staging.

That physicality not only chimed nicely with the Festival’s opening event, MACRO at Murrayfield, and the acrobatics of Australia’s Gravity & Other Myths there, but is part of a trend in contemporary opera production also to be seen in Phelim McDermott’s staging of Glass’s Akhnaten with Gandini Juggling. The aerialists here serve a similar purpose in keeping the stage full of action during the crucial instrumental passages of Dvorak’s score.

Boyd and the Philharmonia are as pivotal to the story-telling as that music unfolds, with its vocabulary of themes tied to the characters. Those three nymphs immediately suggest the Ring’s Rhinemaidens, and the Wagnerian parallels were also obvious in Christine Rice’s characterful Jezibaba and Musa Ngqungwana’s ambiguous, ambivalent Vodnik.

On the human side of the story, Gerald Schneider brings a wealth of experience in the role to the Prince and Sky Ingram, who has played the title role, is a stylish, predatory Foreign Princess. However, for all the individual brilliance – amongst the orchestral soloists in the pit as well as onstage – this Rusalka is ultimately a very fine ensemble creation. The darkest of adult fairytales, as far from Disney’s Little Mermaid as you might imagine, it is full of contemporary resonances 120 years on from its premiere – and they leap quite startlingly from the surtitle text in this Czech language production.

Keith Bruce

Further performances on Monday and Tuesday. eif.co.uk

Picture of Rusalka’s Three Nymphs by Andrew Perry

Boyd is Back in Town

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Douglas Boyd makes a rare return to his native Scotland conducting Garsington Opera’s Rusalka at the Edinburgh International Festival. He talks to KEN WALTON

Since turning exclusively to conducting 16 years ago, the former oboist, Glasgow-born Douglas Boyd, has forged a solid reputation among fellow musicians as an out-and-out enthusiast. They warm to his lack of airs and graces, no doubt informed by his first-hand understanding of how orchestral players respond and operate. His own playing career took the now 63-year-old from principal oboe and founding member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe to recitalist in such auspicious venues as New York’s Carnegie Hall.

When he eventually laid down the double reed in favour of a single baton, he had already successfully tested the water as music director of Manchester Camerata. He has since held leading conducting positions with the Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur, the Paris Chamber Orchestra, and in the US the St Paul Chamber Orchestra and Colorado Symphony Orchestra.

But it’s in his capacity as artistic director of Garsington Opera, a post he has held for the last ten years, that Boyd will star in the opening few days of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. On Saturday, the Buckingham-based company brings its recent new production of Dvorak’s fairy-tale opera Rusalka to the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, where it plays – with the Philharmonia Orchestra in the pit, Welsh soprano Natalya Romaniw in the title role, and circus artists adding to the spectacle – for three performances.

Boyd is delighted to be returning to Scotland. “It means a lot to be back,” he says. “I hardly ever perform there, but have been recently, working with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra during the pandemic and more recently doing an utterly inspiring project with junior students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.” 

Already, this new Rusalka has attracted rosy comment. Reviewers of last month’s Garsington opening were intrigued by the action-packed staging directed by Jack Furness – who next week will escape Edinburgh to launch his new outdoor production of Bernstein’s Candide in Glasgow for Scottish Opera – and who were especially won over by Boyd’s luxurious realisation of one of Dvorak’s most impressive operatic scores.

“I think it’s one of the great fin de siècle masterpieces,” claims the conductor. “I feel I’m conducting the best music that’s ever been written. We tend to focus on one single aria, the Song to the Moon, but in the broader sense it’s the way Dvorak paints this fantastic text, not only in the vocal line, but throughout the orchestral score.  It’s all very Wagnerian, he adds, “where every emotion and symbol is painted in sound.” 

Rusalka review at Garsington Opera at Wormsley, Buckinghamshire, composed by Antonin Dvorak, conducted by Douglas Boyd and starring Natalya Romaniw
Natalya Romaniw in Garsington Opera’s Rusalka

While it’s a fairy tale, it’s very much the adult variety, he argues. “You have to remember that the concept of fairly tales nowadays has been so Disneyfied and made into a children’s genre, whereas if you go back to the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen, it’s actually about our deepest fears as people, which starts in childhood and continues through adulthood. Grimms’ tales can be really horrific and scary; there’s an element of that in Rusalka as well.”

Indeed so. Dvorak’s librettist Jaroslav Kvapil fashioned Rusalka on Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Rusalka, a water nymph, wishes to become a human in order to capture the love of a Prince. The witch, Jezibaba, obliges, but with conditions: Rusalka must remain mute and the Prince must remain true to her. A Foreign Princess plots against them, the Prince rejects Rusalka, then repents. But the curse holds and a desperate kiss leads to the Prince’s death. Rusalka disappears into the watery depths.

It’s possible, says Boyd, to sense that foreboding in the orchestral score well before tragedy reveals its hand on stage. “As in Wagner, there are leitmotifs for each character, like the Rusalka theme at the beginning which is so incredibly beautiful, but when it comes back at the very end of Act 3, it does so as a funeral march. The truth is it’s been a funeral march the whole time, but it takes you until then to finally make that realisation.”

The story in this production is expressed in the original Czech, which Boyd and Furness both see as essential in reflecting the perfect symbiosis of Kvapil’s text and Dvorak’s music. “As long as you’ve got the supertitles in front of you, you get the best of both words. With a good translation you’re not excluding the audience, you’re embracing them, bringing them in. However, the stresses of the Czech language are so intrinsic to Dvorak’s music. The danger sometimes of singing it in English is it can get quite eggy, like trying to fit a square into a circle.”

But there’s always plenty to feast the eyes on in a production that aims to highlight the opera’s to-ing and fro-ing between the world of nymphs and the human world. “We’ve got aerialists [drilled by circus choreographer Lina Johansson] and pretty spectacular things going on on stage which is actually true to this halfway house,” says Boyd. Their presence has also enabled the production to fill Dvorak’s extended orchestral passages with additional representational movement.

For Boyd, the experience has cemented his view that Dvorak’s legacy as as opera composer has been unjustly underappreciated. “I think we tend to fixate on his instrumental output, on the last couple of symphonies, the chamber music, the Cello Concerto,” he argues. “But I think Rusalka is the product of a composer absolutely at the peak of his powers.” 

Garsington Opera’s Rusalka is at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre. 6, 8 & 9 August. http://www.eif.co.uk/events/rusalka

SCO / Boyd / Osborne

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Perth Concert Hall

It is not a strategy any sane person would recommend, of course, but the long period without performances at full strength has surely produced an audibly re-energised Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Or perhaps that is to do an injustice to oboist and conductor Douglas Boyd, whose direction of this concert shows that every section of the band is within reach of his eloquent arms.

Nonetheless, it is the wind section that shines brightest in the opening performance of Mendelssohn’s Overture: The Fair Melusine, and in particular the flute of Bronte Hudnott and the clarinet of Maximiliano Martin. With natural trumpets and horns, there is a robust period-band approach from Boyd and an appreciation that the narrative of the daft mermaid story is still a tragic one.

This reviewer is not much given to tears, but the performance by pianist Steven Osborne and the orchestra of the Adagio slow movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G brought a lump to the throat. That this achingly melody should have been the last thing Maurice Ravel wrote for these forces is poignant, but the emotional power of the unfolding line – a real challenge for the soloist to express as beautifully as Osborne does here – is all in the notes themselves.

The muscularity that was apparent in the Mendelssohn continues into the first movement’s percussive opening, from orchestra and then piano. This is the richest of early-20th century compositions, full of echoes of dance, jazz and ethnic music, the movement ending as boldly and expressively as it begins. The closing Presto movement goes at full pelt from the off, with Osborne’s lightning work at the keyboard matched by piccolo, E-flat clarinet and impressively zippy bassoon playing. Especially memorable in the online incarnation is the piano’s partnership with the cor anglais of Imogen Davies, given a lovely retro realisation in the vision-mix by film partner Stagecast and director Phil Glenny.

The programme ends with Mozart’s “Paris” Symphony, No 31, and the SCO knows playing Mozart’s symphonies in the way that Rick Stein is worth listening to on cooking fish. This was the composer’s first “full-strength” symphony, new-fangled clarinets and all, even if the instrument is strangely undeployed in the flowing dynamics of the Andantino. The outer Allegro movements were as Boyd’s Mendelssohn predicted, with the timpani-driven march at the start of the finale emblematic of commitment evident across the programme as a whole.

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Keith Bruce