Scottish Opera: The Strauss Collection
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
For all that they contain fabulous music, have boasted the finest singers, and offer an onstage showcase to Scottish Opera’s excellent orchestra, the company’s Composer Collection concerts increasingly seem to fall between stools: neither the full score nor the greatest hits of the operas or their creators.
The poor attendance for this concert of three chunks of Strauss from his partnership with Hugo von Hofmannsthal perhaps suggests that such misgivings are commoner than the company might hope, but for aficionados of opera the inclusion of four selections from the pair’s rarely-performed final collaboration, Arabella, was the main attraction.
They included the only solo aria of the programme, from Roland Wood as Mandryka, but fans of the baritone had to enjoy that one brief moment in the spotlight because the main focus of the concert was on the female soloists, mezzo Hanna Hipp, and sopranos Rhian Lois and Helena Dix.
Dix conveyed the flighty nature of Arabella with ease. She and Lois, as her sister Zdenka, were a excellent double-act in the opening duet, full of conversational virtuosity, while she and Wood combined in the two duets that gave a flavour of the development and denouement of the plot. The respectful word-setting of the composer, whose librettist died years before the work saw the stage, was evident, while much of the best music came from the orchestra, conducted by Stuart Stratford, who was all over the dynamic details of the score.
The 1933 work was preceded by a section of the Prologue from the 1916 revision of Ariadne auf Naxos, which used all four singers but was built around the growing infatuation of The Composer (Hanna Hipp) with Zerbinetta (Lois). With Wood singing The Music Master, it also introduced Helena Dix, the superstar of the line-up, in the best possible way, as The Prima Donna. Theatrical tantrums rarely sound as good as this, with orchestra leader Tony Moffat and the wind soloists the instrumental stars of the smaller ensemble.
A much fuller orchestra took the stage for Arabella and the sequence from Der Rosenkavalier that followed the interval. Dix was, of course, The Marschallin, Hipp was also superb as Octavian, and Lois sang Sophie in three well-chosen sections from each of the acts, all three women emerging in a change of costume to bring some sense of a gala to the occasion.
It was as much of a delight, however, to be able to see as well as hear the players producing the details of the fabulous orchestral score, down to the tiniest details of hand percussion and including crisp, precise playing from the brass and winds.
As a concert programme, repeated at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall this evening, this tasting menu of Strauss was undoubtedly a success, but perhaps the company’s resources might have been better deployed on a full performance of the Arabella score, with the involvement of a stage director, in the mould of another strand of its recent work.
Keith Bruce
