Tag Archives: Roland Wood

Scottish Opera: The Strauss Collection

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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

Scottish Opera’s new season

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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.”

Pictured: Jonathan Dove

Scottish Opera / Don Giovanni

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Theatre Royal, Glasgow

From the flashing of the house-lights, thunder sound effects and appearance of a masked figure behind the gauze at the beginning of the overture, there is a Hammer Horror kitsch element to Sir Thomas Allen’s Gothic Venice-set Don Giovanni, Simon Higlett’s clever adaptable designs for the Theatre Royal’s restricted space beautifully lit by Mark Jonathan. Even the chorus scene of Zerlina and Masetto’s pre-nup party is very monochrome, and only Kitty Whately’s Donna Elvira costume – is her character choosing to be a scarlet woman? – provides a flash of colour.

That scenic palette is, however, in stark contrast to almost every other element of a subtle production. Starting in the pit, where natural trumpets sit alongside modern horns, and the continuo playing is superbly balanced with the orchestra’s big dramatic moments, this an evening in which nothing is over-played. Giovanni can be performed very effectively as melodrama, but this narrative staging is much more interested in realism, even soap opera – in a good way.

All the central characters are believably human, with the inevitable exception of Keel Watson’s stocky vengeful Commendatore, who spends most of the evening cast in stone, after his initial appearance as a worried father. The physical balance between Zachary Altman’s miserable but venal Leporello and Roland Wood’s cavalier, single-minded Don Giovanni is pretty much ideal, which is often not the case. That casting common-sense runs through the principal roles, with Whately at once the most authoritative of the women and the most vulnerable, and Korean soprano Hye-Houn Lee, in glorious voice as Donna Anna, somehow revelling in her victimhood. Completing a top trio of female performances, Lea Shaw, who is in her second year as a Scottish Opera Emerging Artist, grows more confident in each role she undertakes, and is both blowsy and naïve as Zerlina.

Besides Altman, the other company debuts come from Emyr Wyn Jones as Masetto and Pablo Bemsch as Don Ottavio – Zerlina’s low-born fiancé likeable but dim, Donna Anna’s effete courtier equally useless but whose equivocal arias are exceptionally well sung.

With the focus clearly on the ensemble work from trio to septet, no-one pitches for the applause in their solos, and given the liveliness of the show elsewhere, some of these stand-and-sing moments seem the weakest elements, regardless of the quality of the singing. By comparison, the end of Act 1, when the stage is full of distractions to cover Giovanni’s seduction of Zerlina, including an early ghostly appearance by the Commendatore, is quite masterly, and the perfect set up for the intricate music of that septet.  

The stage-craft of Allen and his cast, with choreographer Kally Lloyd-Jones and James Fleming and Gary Connery directing fights and stunts, is top drawer, and even the sub-Cyrano business of Giovanni and Leporello swapping clothes and identities at the start of Act 2 is dispatched with casual ease.

While there is never any doubt who is villain of the piece – Wood is consumed by flames and booed at the curtain call – no-one escapes censure in Da Ponte’s libretto or in this production.  In the closing sextet, often omitted in years gone by,  they sing that Giovanni’s death was a fair result for his evil life. The ambiguity in the air is whether their share of culpability might also prove a stumbling block on the path to the Pearly Gates.

Keith Bruce

Performance sponsored by Miller Samuel Hill Brown. Touring to Inverness, Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

Picture: Roland Wood (Don Giovanni) and Lea Shaw (Zerlina) by James Glossop

The Puccini Collection

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Caird Hall, Dundee

It is likely that this one-off in what is arguably Scotland’s grandest and most under-used concert hall had its singular shape dictated by its financial foundations, but it did seem a bit of a missed opportunity that only Sunday’s ticket-holders were able to enjoy it. Scottish Opera has blazed a trail for filmed performances of high standard during the pandemic, and this brisk trot through the catalogue of Giacomo Puccini would have been an excellent addition to that list, not to mention being very well timed if things are about to take a turn for the worse once again.

For all its excellent content – and it was often very good indeed – the event did fall between stools in other ways too. As conductor Stuart Stratford conceded right at the start, it featured not a note from Madam Butterfly, which could only be a deficiency – any Puccini Collection without Butterfly is surely incomplete.

For most Tayside ticketholders the focus was surely chiefly on the soloists – sopranos Sinead Campbell-Wallace and Catriona Hewitson, tenors David Junghoon Kim and Fraser Simpson, and baritone Roland Wood – but really the concert belonged in the sequence of Sunday events in Glasgow and Edinburgh where Stratford has showcased the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, and his introductions to the music reflected that. It seems likely there was little rehearsal time in the performance venue, however, and initially the big voices of both Campbell-Wallace and Wood were swamped by the orchestra in the extracts from Manon Lescaut and Tosca, although a better balance was achieved after the interval.

That was never the case for Kim, however, whose Scottish Opera debut this was, and whose glorious voice encouraged hopes of a full role with the company soon. The fact that the programme ended with his solo Nessun Dorma – the only music from Turandot – suggests that Stratford is well aware of his quality, and also effectively ended any idea the audience might have had of requesting an encore.

In the second half the big offering was Act III of La Boheme, featuring everyone bar Simpson, whose sole contribution had been a cameo as Spoletta in a segment of Act II of Tosca. With instrumental offerings from Manon and La Villi featuring the orchestra – including an early spotlight on front desk string soloists – there was also a solo spot for Emerging Artist Catriona Hewitson, whose top notes as Magda in La rondine were a joy.

Something for everyone then, but also a somewhat jumbled bill of fare as a programme, built around the experience of Campbell-Wallace and Wood in Scottish Opera’s 2019 Tosca and having another high spot in their duet as Minnie and Jack Rance from La fanciulla del West. Taken as a grander version of the company’s popular Opera Highlights tours, it was a show that sent its customers home well-satisfied.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Fraser Band