The presence of an RSNO Chorus stalwart alongside the young people in the drum troupe that is the voice of protest in Jonathan Dove’s new concert opera summed up what was special about this performance.
Under the baton of Ellie Slorach, and with the orchestra dressed down from their usual concert uniform, this was Scotland’s National Orchestra in best community-engagement mode. The Scottish premiere of Uprising, a new score by Dove with a libretto by April de Angelis, showed that the precise combination of form and function is not only the concern of designers of physical objects.
The opera is a story of climate activism, and one young woman’s scorned protest being taken up by her class-mates at school before adults join her against the authorities. It is an essential part of the work’s design that it involved the RSNO Youth Chorus and the untrained singers of the RSNO Chorus Academy. That Brenda Williamson, with over 50 years’ experience in the choir, should choose to make her contribution by leaving the alto section to hit a floor tom-tom instead of singing was entirely in the spirit of the occasion.
Dove’s music begins with an evocation of dawn, or creation, and proceeds through a week of eventful days that is clearly intended to recall the first book of Genesis, except that this is a fight against the destruction of the world.
Similarly, Lola Green is obviously supposed to remind us of Greta Thunberg, but deliberately cast as closer to home. In fact Thunberg will make a cameo appearance in the voice of a Youth Chorus member, when Lola’s one-woman protest at her school finds echoes around the world in an effective portrayal of social media’s beneficial role.
From the beginning, the eclectic score is full of obvious reminders of other operatic works. Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel is there in the dynamic of Lola’s family with her ambitious mother (Madeleine Shaw), more persuadable and domestic dad (Marcus Farnsworth), and eye-rolling phone-focused sister (Julieth Lozano Rolong). Britten’s Peter Grimes might be glimpsed in Lola’s outsider status, and the mystical world of Wagner’s Ring is often not far away.
The composer’s use of musical motif is certainly unmissable. Edwin Kaye’s swaggering but shallow Mayor was partnered by John Whitener’s tuba and Rhys Batt’s Doctor, summoned to “treat” Lola for her pessimistic obsession, by a sinister ensemble of winds.
The principals were terrific, particularly Ffion Edwards’s Lola, Shaw and Farnsworth, but just as important was the quality of the work from individual amateur singers in step-out roles, both from the Youth Chorus and the adult community cohort. Director Sinead O’Neill had done wonders to make the show happen, using such large numbers in such limited space, and there was never any lack of clarity in the storytelling, even when the narrative moved into a more magical reality in the second half and the threatened trees are given their own musical voice.
Perhaps the work seems a little unsure how to resolve itself, and dithers a little in the decision, but the choruses have some of their best music as it comes to an ending of understandably qualified optimism.
Keith Bruce
Picture by Katie Kean – Ffion Edwards and Julieth Lozano Rolong with RSNO and RSNO Youth Chorus
There’s a craftsmanship throughout Jonathan Dove’s operatic scores that is both cinematically detailed and musically invigorating. Marx in London!, written originally for its German premiere in 2018, and which Scottish Opera this week introduced to the UK, upholds these qualities. Just as importantly, it’s a rib-tickling night out.
In mounting the UK premiere, Scottish Opera has brought together the tried and tested creative partnership of Dove and stage director Stephen Barlow, both of whom gave Scotland a memorable production of Dove’s Flight in 2018. That was set in an airport. Marx in London! covers a day in the life of Karl Marx, set in his London home and playing to a side of Marx that was, if we are to believe it, more Groucho than Karl.
It’s a madcap comedy centred on the accepted belief that the famous German political philosopher, while sternly didactic in his social theories, was an absolute catastrophe when it came to mundane domestic responsibilities. What’s more, Scottish Opera gave the green light to Barlow to create a brand new production, having adjudged the original Bonn production, which didn’t involve him, short of the mark.
The result is exuberant, quirky, action-packed and wickedly ridiculing, hitting somewhere between Mozartian opera buffa and Springtime for Hitler. Marx is broke, bailiffs empty his house, he’s party to convoluted sexual entanglement involving his wife, the housekeeper and, it transpires, a son Freddy courtesy of the latter.
Charles Hart’s libretto is bullet-like, Barlow’s direction is ceaselessly inventive, Yannis Thevoris’ playful designs bear an animated picture book charm, Kally Lloyd-Jones’ choreography bristles with irony – all embracing Dove’s music, which is vigorously minimalist in essence.
Not one of this cast fails to honour the challenge. Central to that is Marx himself, baritone Roland Wood’s portrayal ricocheting from one bumbling escapade to the next, comical with the merest hint of sage. He’s to some extent swamped by the people and events surrounding him: long-suffering wife Jenny (the passionately-voiced, ultimately Brünnhilde-like, Orla Boylan), flighty daughter Tussi (her vocal acrobatics sung fearlessly by coloratura Rebecca Bottone), enigmatic housekeeper Helene (the warm-hearted mezzo voice of Lucy Schaufer), the searching young Freddy (played engagingly by William Morgan), and a stoically forbearing Friedrich Engels (sung by tenor Alasdair Elliott).
A confection of characters sharpen the periphery, among them Jamie MacDougall’s prowling Prussian Spy and John Malloy’s indignant pawnbroker. The chorus add vocal girth to well-engineered high points. Conductor David Parry – another seasoned Dove collaborator – ensures the music’s cut and thrust does its vital job, realised by a Scottish Opera Orchestra in truly vibrant form.
It’s a show that knows exactly how to celebrate slapstick, satire and farce without veering towards the ridiculous. And guaranteed, you won’t take Marx seriously ever again.
[Photo credit: James Glossop]
Ken Walton
Further performances in Glasgow (15 & 17 Feb); and in Edinburgh (22 & 24 Feb)
As its 60th anniversary celebrations wind-up with a new staging of Bizet’s Carmen, Scottish Opera has unveiled its 2023/24 season, with a new production of Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London! and revivals of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Verdi’s La traviata the mainstage offerings.
Chief executive and general director Alex Reedijk acknowledges that the activity level of the birthday year could not be maintained.
“On the back of a tremendous 60th anniversary we’ve put together what we hope is an interesting season for our audiences,” he said. “The 60th anniversary season was a combination of new productions and a big commitment to finishing off work that had been in the pipeline pre-Covid. Now a new economic reality is dawning – not particularly for Scottish Opera, but more widely across the performing arts in the UK and in Scotland.
“We are focussed on maintaining the momentum we’re building with audiences returning to our productions after the pandemic. Carmen’s advance sales are as strong as we’ve ever seen, so Barber and Traviata are us trying to maintain that momentum. Our average attendance has been very good for our 60th anniversary, 85 to 90 per cent of capacity, and we’ve seen a change in where that audience is coming from, with an uptick in metropolitan areas.”
Sir Thomas Allen’s staging of the Rossini will be sung in Amanda Holden’s English translation, with Samuel Dale Johnson in the title role, opening in October. This time next year, Sir David McVicar’s 2008 La Traviata will also tour from Glasgow to Inverness, Aberdeen and Edinburgh, with Hye-Youn Lee as Violetta.
Following a year that featured four new productions in Candide, Ainadamar, Il trittico and Carmen, much attention will focus on next February’s unveiling of director Stephen Barlow’s new staging of Dove’s Marx in London, superseding Scottish Opera’s investment in the original German production at the end of 2018.
“It’s a proper helter-skelter through Marx’s life,” said Reedijk, “delivered in one day of his life in London. It had its world premiere in Bonn and then lost a bit of momentum, but like Flight [a hit for the company earlier in 2018] it takes characters with humour and pathos through a very intense period.
“On reflection we decided to start afresh with the production, taking a different visual direction because we loved what Stephen Barlow did with Flight. It seemed right to bring his focus and sense of humour to bear on Marx.”
Reedijk adds that much of what has happened in the UK in the intervening years gives the director material to draw upon.
“There has been much to say about capitalism, London life and how someone’s public face relates to their chaotic private life. We have seen that in one or two of our more recent leadership models – some of whom have delivered chaos both publicly and privately!”
The show will play Glasgow and Edinburgh, with David Parry conducting and company favourite Roland Wood, mostly recently seen in McVicar’s Il trittico, as Karl Marx.
“Roland has revealed, in both Tosca and Falstaff, the capacity to find humour as well as pathos in a role, as well as a degree of physical menace. He’s become a really rich performer, and we love using him,” said Reedijk.
The 23/24 season will open with a concert performance of Richard Strauss rarity Daphne, the company’s contribution to the Lammermuir Festival, but having a preview performance at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal before visiting St Mary’s in Haddington and then later repeated at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. Music director Stuart Stratford conducts that and both the Rossini and Verdi revivals.
“Lammermuir Festival has been a wonderful provocation for us,” said Reedijk. “It has enabled us to consider what repertoire would appeal to a particular audience, and for Stuart to continue to find work that has either rarely or never been presented in Scotland. By also presenting that in Glasgow and Edinburgh we are sharing that with other audiences.”
Elsewhere in the year, alongside regular features like the Opera Highlight tours, Scottish Opera Young Company has a mini-tour of Glasgow, Largs and Stirling with a double bill of new work Maud by Henry McPherson, a winner in the company’s 2018 Opera Sparks initiative, and Kurt Weill’s Down in the Valley.
“The stories that underpin those operas are centuries apart but both have resonances for communities in Scotland,” said Reedijk.
“It was always the intention that the Young Company would be part of a pathway into the world of opera – not necessarily Scottish Opera, but the artform – just as the Emerging Artists programme is about preparing younger, post-grad singers for life in the opera world.
“One happy outcome of Covid was the amount of attention we were able to give to that programme, and the singers came out of that experience even more operatically muscular, and we’ve been able to find them work in main-stage productions as well as in Opera Highlights and other projects.”
Featuring a full complement of the Scottish orchestras, the presence of Scottish Opera, quality string quartets and more top drawer pianists than is quite decent, one of the few things the 2022 Lammermuir Festival is not about is debuts. Or perhaps it is.
With The Marian Consort, Sansara, The Orlando Consort and Dunedin Consort still to come in the chamber choir line-up, that strand began with the first public concert by the newest ensemble under the capacious umbrella of the National Youth Choir of Scotland.
Long in the planning, or at least in the aspirations of NYCoS founder and artistic director Christopher Bell, the NYCoS Chamber Choir takes his example of the pursuit of excellence with the young musicians of Scotland to another level. If the full forces of the senior choir have already impressed some of the world’s top conductors in performances in Edinburgh, London, Europe and the United States, this elite unit of between 20 and 30 young voices is a refinement of that success.
What Bell has done with the formation of the Chamber Choir is select the finest voices within the current cohort – and possibly recent graduates who are beyond the stipulated age-range in future incarnations – and created a group that can tackle specific repertoire. Who knows what that might be in the future, but this first concert set bold, contemporary parameters – putting, perhaps quite deliberately, clear distance between the NYCoS Chamber Choir and the other vocal groups at this year’s Lammermuir.
With Michael Bawtree at the organ for Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, which opened the recital, and the piano for Jonathan Dove’s The Passing of the Year, which concluded it, the other two works were a cappella – James MacMillan’s Culham Motets and Caroline Shaw’s And the swallow.
Only the Dove, which dates from 2000, could be described as a secular work, although some of the poetry he sets – Blake, Dickinson and Tennyson among the texts – is faith-inspired. It was an especially appropriate work, not just for an unintended allusion to the death of the Queen, but also because the setting of Dickinson’s Answer July seemed to be a mature version of the sort of songs NYCoS has commissioned as part of its invaluable training of young musicians over its 25 years.
That coming to maturity of the organisation is perfectly celebrated in the birth of this choir. If Britten’s fascinating 1943 work – commissioned by the same clergyman responsible for Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and setting texts by troubled 18th century poet Christopher Smart – is not heard very often, it is because it is far from easy. Here too, though, step-outs from soprano Emily Kemp and alto Olivia Mackenzie Smith take the listener into a child-like world of cat and mouse, while tenor Alexander Roland and bass Christopher Brighty each made powerful solo contributions.
Kemp then supported fellow soprano Lorna Murray in the exquisite close harmony passages of the MacMillan, while all the female voices provided an ethereal underscore to solo tenor Lewis Gilchrist. With alto Morven McIntyre and tenor Jack Mowbray the solo voices in the Dove, this was a chance for individuals to shine, but mainly about the meticulous performance of the ensemble of young men and women whose musical abilities far transcend any “youth choir” or “non-professional” categorisation.
The group also gives Bell access to a whole realm of repertoire, including the newest piece in this programme, the setting of verses from Psalm 84 by America’s composer-of-the-moment, Caroline Shaw. And the swallow is a gorgeous piece which seems to take the sound-world of Whitacre or Lauridsen into a more sophisticated sphere, not least in the imaginative and specific vocal techniques it demands.
Composer Jonathan Dove talks to KEITH BRUCE about Flight and a possible Scots premiere for his newest work
Although American Jake Heggie, less than two years his junior, out-scores him internationally, on this side of the Atlantic composer Jonathan Dove is the most produced contemporary opera composer of his generation.
Among performers, and some directors, that status might come with airs and graces, and even diva-like behaviour. Composers? Not so much.
So when the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s head of opera studies Philip White requested a reduced score of one of Dove’s biggest hits, Flight, to meet the strictures of social distancing in the pit of the New Athenaeum Theatre in Glasgow during the pandemic, the composer immediately sat down and re-wrote his work for 19 players.
In the event, further restrictions made it impossible to stage the production at all until earlier this month, when it happened to coincide with the RSNO and theatre company Visible Fictions taking a newer Dove work, Gaspard’s Foxtrot, setting the children’s stories of Zeb Soanes, out on the road to primary schools as well as presenting it on the orchestra’s digital platform.
There, in a nutshell, was the range of Jonathan Dove’s work for the stage, and the main ingredients of his compositional life, if Scots music-lovers were minded to explore it, although his full catalogue stretches into many other areas of orchestral and chamber music, as well as songs.
“I am always happiest if I have an opera project on the go or on the horizon,” he told me on the day James Bonas’s production of Flight at the RCS finally opened. “I describe myself as a musical story-teller, even when it is not an opera, like Gaspard’s Foxtrot with Zeb Soanes and the RSNO.
“The RSNO co-commissioned it and they’ve done a lot with it. Writing songs and choral pieces is also story-telling, but it is a Peter and the Wolf kind of piece – that is very obviously the model.”
As for Flight, it is a work that has been performed all over the world since 1998, with Scottish Opera’s adapting an Opera Holland Park staging in 2018.
Rosalind Dobson as The Controller in Flight at RCS, picture by Robert McFadzean
“There have been two productions this year in the US alone, one in Utah and one in Dallas, and over the years people have asked for a slim down version, so I knew there was some demand for that. But I hadn’t had time and I didn’t want anyone else to do it, because I didn’t trust them to do it well.
“I came to Glasgow specifically to hear if the new orchestration works, and I think it helps that it is a bit leaner for young voices. I am obviously very pleased that Flight is seen in conservatoires. There is something for every voice type in it: a stratospheric soprano, a lyric soprano, a counter tenor and a bass alongside tenor, baritone and mezzo-soprano.
“It is quite a good showcase, although that wasn’t what I was thinking when I wrote it. For me the airport was a sort of microcosm of a community. But you get know these people but you also get to hear them singing in quite a lot of states and moods, so you can hear what people can do.”
Lindsay Johnson as Minskwoman in RCS Flight
Making the reduced version of the orchestral score took Dove back to his own beginnings as an opera composer, and to memories of the man who was a mentor in the process, director Graham Vick, who died last summer after contracting Covid-19.
“A very important part of my musical education in my twenties was re-scoring masterpieces of the operatic repertoire for his touring company. I rescored La Cenerentola, The Magic Flute, Falstaff, La boheme and The Ring for orchestras of between 15 and 18 players.
“Graham was a shockingly late victim of the pandemic, just when you thought the world was getting safer. It was really only after he died that I saw clearly how much he had changed my life. Re-scoring masterpieces of the repertoire and seeing him direct them was an amazing education.
“The most important experience was one particular production, an Opera North outreach project with West Side Story in a disused cotton-mill. That production introduced me to so many things. At that point I was assistant chorus-master at Glyndebourne, but the experience of working with 200 people from the community in that production was a revelation – how hungry they were for it.
“That was very different from working with a professional opera chorus – they’ve trained for that, they know that they can do it. That show introduced me to community opera, and to site-specific work and promenade performance. At that moment I never wanted to see another proscenium-arch production, because it was so much more involving.”
If Dove has now rowed back from that position it was not before he had taken the lessons of Vick’s work and applied it to his own practice – a journey that led to his breakthrough opera.
“I wondered what it would be like if the community cast were telling their own story and not a New York story. Around the same time, Glyndebourne was thinking about an opera involving a couple of school and I said: ‘Why not involve a whole town?’ So we did that in Hastings with about 200 people, including any musicians and performers that wanted to be in it. There was the Boys Brigade band, there was a symphony orchestra, there was a yodelling harmonica player and Morris dancers.
“Another one followed in Ashford where there was an accordion club and a guitar orchestra and a rock band, and then one in Peterborough, and I found things for them all to do, and it always felt like the most unquestionably worthwhile thing that I was doing.
“The total experience of everyone in it, and what they learned from it – that was my road to Damascus experience. Those three community operas for Glyndebourne led directly to them commissioning Flight, which is still the work of mine that people most often tell me that they have seen.
“So it was from Graham I got the belief in opera as a medium whose importance should not be restricted to opera houses: that mission that opera is for everyone. He was a unique spirit.”
The relationship with the director continued, notably with 2012’s adaptation of Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s play Life is a Dream for Vick’s Birmingham Opera Company. Dove’s other operas have drawn on classic novels (Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park), the troubled life of Buzz Aldrin (Man on the Moon) and the death of Princess Diana.
Parallel with those have been the works for young people, from Tobias and the Angel in 1999, via The Adventures of Pinocchio in 2007 to 2015’s The Monster in the Maze, based on the classical tale of Theseus and the Minotaur and created in partnership with conductor Sir Simon Rattle.
“It is the opera of mine that was been translated most. It was a co-commission between the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Aix festival, so there were three productions just weeks apart, all conducted by Simon Rattle, in German, English and French.
“It was also done in Taiwan in Cantonese and Taiwanese and I couldn’t get to that, but I have seen it in Swedish, in Portuguese in Lisbon and in Catalan in Barcelona, where it has now been done three times.”
The Dove children’s opera currently on his desk is for Zurich, based on Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, with Act 1 already completed.
Philip White’s students at the Conservatoire staged 2015’s post-Apocalypse The Day After as a sort of companion piece to the Scottish Opera Flight four years ago, and Dove’s most recent work for an adult audience, Marx in London, was first seen in Bonn and could be destined for a Scottish outing soon.
“Marx in London was the idea of director Jurgen Weber, who had directed an amazing production of an opera of mine, Swanhunter, written for an intended audience of teenagers. His idea was that Marx’s life was like a farce and that it would make a good comic opera.”
With a libretto by Charles Hart, whose past work includes Lloyd Webber’s Phantom, Marx in London premiered at the end of 2018, when it was co-produced by Scottish Opera. At the time there was speculation that the production might be seen in Scotland in 2020, and if it is still on the cards, Dove cannot confirm.
“Scottish Opera have made a financial commitment so it would be natural if they were the first to do it here,” he says. “There are still hopes that it will be staged in the not too distant future.”
Approaching a quarter century ago, the premise of the airport-set Flight by composer Jonathan Dove and librettist April de Angelis – a comic opera inspired by the plight of an Iranian refugee who lived for years in Paris Charles de Gaulle – was bold. When it was most recently seen in Glasgow, in Scottish Opera’s 2018 staging, it was an established contemporary classic.
This much-delayed RCS version, with a cast that, doubling five of the roles, draws on three year-groups of students whose studies have been interrupted by the pandemic – some of them now graduated – arrives at a time when Europe has a new refugee crisis and the notion of two of the characters possibly embarking on a new life in Minsk, the capital of Russia-aligned Belarus, has an unintended resonance.
Whether we are in the precise here-and-now is hard to say. Those with more fashion nous than myself might have a precise view on the costuming. The dramatic concrete architecture of the suggested concourse in Tom Paris’s design is certainly drawn from recent airport construction, but the “space age” instruments visible in the control tower have a retro look and the stratospheric soprano Controller herself – Rosalind Dodson in this cast – prefaces her announcements with a few chimes on a glockenspiel, like the Rydell High School secretary in Grease.
Director James Bonas delights in all the details of his staging, in the luggage and the drinks trolley, magazines and make-up, and a disturbingly realistic puppet new-born, but never loses sight of the bigger picture – the classic one of a handful of well-drawn characters confined in a dramatic space.
The weird distant relationship between the Controller and the Refugee (counter-tenor Matt Paine) is particularly well drawn, while Claudia Haussmann and Cameron Mitchell swiftly establish the comic potential of Tina and Bill’s rocky marriage, paralleled by the more hedonistic attitude of the Steward (Jonathan Forbes Kennedy) and Stewardess (Charlotte Richardson).
There is lots of playing with stereotypes by Dove and de Angelis and these young singers are particularly successful in catching the cliches in the roles of the women, the quartet of female passengers completed by Polish mezzo Wiktoria Wizner as a sultry, if stood-up, fiancée, and Scots mezzo Lindsay Grace Johnson following her Mutter in Hansel und Gretel with the infant-producing Minskwoman.
In this cast, completed by baritones Toki Hamano as Minskman and Eoin Foran as the Immigration Officer, there is not a weak link in vocal performance, and while individual arias are all secure and characterful, even when technically demanding, it is the ensemble work that persists in the mind. These young people may not have been studying together, and some now work far away, but they have come together as a coherent company that more than matches the professional performance we saw four years ago, and that goes for their gestural and collective movement as well as their singing.
Dove’s score is terrifically colourful, in its clever depiction of human reaction to stress as much as in the broader scenic depiction of storm and dawn, and the brand new reduced orchestration he has made for this production is superbly performed by the pit orchestra – actually 30 rather than the 19 Covid restrictions at one time demanded – under conductor Matthew Kofi Waldren. His tempi are brisk, but not a detail of the score was lost, and the three percussionists should have their own special mention.
Further performances March 14, 16 and 18.
Keith Bruce
Picture by Robert McFadzean/RCS shows Lindsay Johnson as Minskwoman
