Tag Archives: Falstaff

EIF: Falstaff

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Festival Theatre

For those in the audience for whom this was a longed-for return to live opera in front of an audience in a theatre, to cavil at all is absurd, but the truth is that Sir David McVicar’s new production of Verdi’s last opera sat much more comfortably in a car-park. The director’s own designs took full advantage of the environment at Scottish Opera’s technical centre in Glasgow’s Edington Street, and will doubtless do so again when the show reaches the semi-outdoor space of US co-producer Santa Fe Opera.

From the absence of the ribald sleaze in the arrival of Sir John’s busy bed onstage at the opera’s opening to the closing pageant of costumes and puppetry in Windsor Park, making still-magical stage pictures but lacking the spooky edge of happening in the real outdoors, this was a contained version of the show that opened a month ago. Rather than rebuilding a Shakespearean theatre, the set is an image of one within a proscenium arch.

That said, there are obvious advantages to being back in the opera house. This production has become a sort-of-tribute to the late Graham Vick, who died from complications of Covid-19 after it opened. The company’s controversial director of productions in the 1980s, he commissioned both Amanda Holden’s English libretto and Jonathan Dove’s reduced orchestration when he founded Birmingham Touring Opera in 1987. Both are displayed (surtitles included) to much better advantage this time around, with the orchestra behind the singers and set on the Festival Theatre’s huge stage (although still, I think, amplified). The balance between voices and instruments is more or less perfect throughout, and the detail of Verdi’s music, which was already very well played, even more clearly audible. The same goes for the clarity of the text, and Holden’s superb choral cry of “Apotheosis!” ranks with Kid Creole’s Coconuts singing “Onomatopoeia” in the canon of Great Backing Vocals of the 1980s.

That chorus is now located in the wings, and where the canal-side trees were revealed behind the set in Edington Street, the orchestra is now revealed to the audience in the last act. The singing of the cast remains as fine as ever, and it is a particular joy to hear Roland Wood’s full-voiced characterful baritone without a microphone in the title role. His is a very considered and rounded portrayal of Falstaff, even in the broadest slapstick-comedy moments. When he sings of the “harvest of my late summer” it is impossible not to apply that to the work’s composer as well, and Scottish Opera does that achievement proud in this staging.

Keith Bruce

Scottish Opera: Falstaff

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40 Edington Street, Glasgow

There can be no great mystery why Verdi’s last opera has proved so popular in recent years, with productions at New York Met, by Laurent Pelly in France, and most recently with Bryn Terfel singing the title role at Grange Park. What can it be in a work about an over-weight amoral acquisitive sexist boor who gets his come-uppance that resonates so clearly in our times?

Thankfully Sir David McVicar’s new production, destined for Santa Fe Opera via an Edinburgh International Festival run, is not just caricature, and carries a conviction that even if the ensemble sings that life is farce, it has its serious side too.

From a rambunctious start with Roland Wood being rolled to the front of a stage in a bed he is sharing with an improbable number of others alongside his Doll-for-the-night, this is a boisterous, busy show where it pays to keep an eye on all corners of McVicar’s elegant tiered timber set. But all that choreography (by Andrew George) goes alongside some fine characterisation. From his first scene address to Bardolph and Pistol (Jamie MacDougall and Alastair Miles) about ‘honour’, there is a dark malevolence to Wood’s Sir John Falstaff that means he is never a mere figure of fun. That aria also marks the first pinnacle in what is a towering vocal performance, very possibly the baritone’s finest in a career that has already made him a Scottish Opera favourite.

There are a few of those in this cast, including Sioned Gwen Davies from Flight and Nixon in China, who is Meg Page, and Elizabeth Llewellyn, Mimi in the fine Boheme that played this same car park in rather less lavish style last September.

Technically, this Covid-era production at the Scottish Opera Production Centre is a big step up. It is obvious in the staging and audible in the sound, with the orchestra and conductor Stuart Stratford under cover in the building next door but every detail of the orchestration audible through the PA, and perfectly mixed with the voices, solo, ensemble, and chorus, arranged by gender on either side of the stage. Occasionally some words of Amanda Holden’s witty English translation of the libretto may be lost on the wind, but for the most part everyone is clearly audible in a cast of singers without a single weak link, and some other quite exceptional performances, including Gemma Summerfield as Nannetta.

Verdi’s sympathies with the women of Windsor, as opposed to the devious, pompous and sometimes hapless men, are never in doubt. McVicar adds his own sumptuous gloss to that in their costuming: the plot may have the men constantly dressing up to disguise or seduce, but the director gives his female cast members more changes of frock than Beyoncé.

Even that cannot rival the theatricality, all scrupulously in period, that he then unleashes for the final scene at Herne’s Oak in Windsor Park. Verdi’s score famously culminates in a fiendish fugue for all the principals, lined up across the stage, and this staging precedes that with a glorious spectacle of puppetry and costumes that makes Bardolph’s ultimate duping of Caius and Ford in the cause of young love all the more believable.

Keith Bruce

IDYLLS AND IDEALS

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Scottish Opera is showcasing its orchestra in a series of lunchtime concerts alongside its new production of Verdi’s Falstaff. Music director Stuart Stratford speaks to Keith Bruce.

Destined for indoor performances at the Festival Theatre as part of this year’s Edinburgh Festival, Sir David McVicar’s new production of Falstaff is also giving Scottish Opera the focus for its own summer festival at its rehearsal space in Glasgow’s Edington Street. The Citizens Theatre, Scottish Ensemble and Scottish Opera Young Company are also part of a programme that runs to August 1 and sees the revival of concerts by the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, the first two of which are between the first two performances of the opera on July 5 and 6, with the third to follow on July 16.

Effectively these have become sectional showcases, offering all the players in the orchestra a chance to hone and display their skills. Falstaff will feature the biggest orchestra the company has been able to field since the start of the pandemic, while the concerts are three programmes of large-scale chamber music.

Music director Stuart Stratford explains: “It is all happening on the stage with the Falstaff set still there.

“We had to keep the numbers of the orchestra down, so the maximum number of players we can have is 15 with social distancing. That was one of the factors in deciding the programme, and we wanted to use as many players in the orchestra as possible over the three concerts. I think we utilised every player in one concert or another except for harp, timpani and percussion.

“It is all about getting us playing again and showing the depth of talent across the orchestra, not just the principal players. So the strings are split into two groups, one led by our assistant leader Katie Hull in the first concert, playing Elgar’s Serenade for Strings and the Three Idylls by Frank Bridge and then leader Tony Moffat leads the other half of the strings in the concert that he is curating with Bach’s Brandenburg 2, Vivaldi, Purcell and Puccini. It is all about a celebration of the orchestra and the repertoire stemmed from that – pieces that showed off our assets.”

The third concert is a showcase for the winds and brass of the orchestra, with music by Dvorak, Stravinsky, and Enrique Crespo.

The horn section of The Orchestra of Scottish Opera. Credit Beth Chalmers.

“I asked for suggestions from everyone. Many of the players suggested the Petite Symphonie by Gounod. Several people suggested the Dvorak Serenade for Winds. I was really keen to do the Stravinsky Octet as it is one of the few chamber pieces that has a bass trombone in it.

“I was delighted that Katie chose to include the Frank Bridge Three Idylls, which is beautiful and not that well known, and makes a nice pairing with the Elgar String Serenade. The Crespo I didn’t know at all. It is a brass quintet that really fitted the brief and it’s a real firework piece to end the brass and wind concert.”

The profile that the orchestra has enjoyed within the company over the recent difficult times looks from the outside to have been in marked contrast to the relationship Scottish Opera had with its musicians in recent years, when the company ceased to have a full-time chorus and put the players on part-time concerts.

That is an impression confirmed from the inside.

A long-term member of the orchestra told VoxCarnyx: “This last year and a half we’ve felt really connected and part of the company for the first time in about a decade. They’ve worked very hard to include us in their future plans. We know we are an integral part of the opera company but it hasn’t always felt like that. We have felt fully supported by Scottish Opera throughout this whole this period. Our artistic value may not have been fully appreciate in the past, but we have done lots of meaningful work during the pandemic.

“These concerts have been thought about very carefully, how to make it work for the size and the space and the players that they have. It’s such a good way to keep everyone’s playing in good form.”

Stratford is clearly proud of the work that the company has done in difficult times, from the film of Menotti’s The Telephone for last year’s Edinburgh Festival through online staged versions of Mozart, Janacek, Humperdinck, and most recently Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore.

“We have tried to keep people going. It is so important not just for their fingers and lips but for people’s mental health as well. We have been able to keep people busy in a meaningful way.”

The Orchestra of Scottish Opera performs as part of the Live at No.40 season on July 5, 6, and 16 at 1pm. Full details and booking information at scottishopera.org.uk

Main Image: Principal oboe Amy Turner with The Orchestra of Scottish Opera. Credit Beth Chalmers.