One of the most inventive creations during the Covid pandemic was VOPERA’s online production of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges with players from the London Phil and a cast that included Karen Cargill as ‘Maman’ (review: VOPERA: L’enfant et les sortileges | VoxCarnyx).
In fact the RSNO gave the work’s Scottish premiere in 1975, 50 years after its first performance in Monte Carlo, and a further half a century later, the orchestra teamed up with the current crop of talent at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to present a staging that not only had the perfect context in the orchestra’s season programme, but also used Glasgow’s concert hall impressively well.
To accommodate the performance behind and above them, the orchestra platform had been extended into the front few rows of the stalls, and the effect on the sound was revelatory from the first work in the concert’s first half.
That was Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a wonderful piece of orchestration that didn’t need the Disney connection from Fantasia to be a well-chosen partner for the Ravel. With its brilliant use of contrabassoon and a series of other solo instrumental turns, it was ideal aural preparation for the cleverness of Ravel’s magical story.
Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which followed, was probably the main attraction for many ticket-buyers, especially as it was played by Ethan Loch, whose performance was being filmed for an upcoming documentary. Soloist and conductor Thomas Sondergard – together with first clarinet Timothy Orpen – served up a perfect Rhapsody, utterly true to its genre-spanning intentions.
However much the pianist was actually improvising his interpretation, it was distinctive and individual, and the pace never let up. Loch’s flamboyant encore of a cadenza from his own piano concerto was less to my taste, but virtuosic.
The collective endeavour behind the 45-minute opera after the interval was nothing short of magnificent. From the choir stalls, the RSNO Youth Chorus made immaculately-drilled contributions, while the RCS Chamber Choir, prepared by Andrew Nunn, sang from stage left of the central playing area. Many of them were costumed for their step-out roles alongside the soloists cast by the Conservatoire’s Head of Vocal Performance and Opera, Jane Irwin.
Mezzo Anna Stephany, as the child, was the sole professional singer, but you’d hardly have known that from the performances of the students. Singling out any individuals would be invidious because this was a terrific collective effort, and as much staging as the piece requires. Ailsa Munro’s costumes and props were witty and apposite, and the direction of Roxana Cole, well-known from her work in challenging venues with Scottish Opera, made remarkably effective use of the limited space, with RSNO first flute Katherine Bryan enthusiastically part of the young company as the instrumental voice of the Princess.
The visible “pit band” in front of them was full of such inspired solo turns, and the skills of this cohort at the Conservatoire, both as soloists and in ensemble were uniformly impressive. If there were a lot of elements for Sondergard to keep working as a team, he appeared to be having the best time doing so.
Keith Bruce
Picture of rehearsal of L’enfant et les sortileges by Hope Connachan-Holmes
Trumpeter John Wallace, who has died at the age of 76 following treatment for cancer, was one of the most dynamic musicians of his generation. Following a career on the front desks of three London orchestras and the founding of his own brass ensemble, the Wallace Collection, he was appointed principal of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in 2002.
His tenure at the institution, which ran until his retirement in 2014, was transformative, including the name change to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to reflect the expanded range of the teaching portfolio, and the opening of the Wallace Studios next to Scottish Opera’s rehearsal space at Speirs Wharf.
Born in Methil in Fife, John began his musical career playing cornet in his father’s works band, the Tullis Russell Mills Band in Glenrothes. In more recent years he performed alongside current players as one of a series of engagements at the East Neuk Festival.
After the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, he studied music at King’s College, Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Music and York University.
A recipient of an OBE in 1995 and a CBE in 2011, he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Music in 2021. He had been a featured soloist alongside Kiri Te Kanawa at the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. He was made a Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society last year.
Professor Jeffrey Sharkey, who succeeded him as RCS Principal, said yesterday: “John Wallace was a legend in the music world – one of Scotland’s own who gave so much to the world as a performer, educator and leader. He was also incredibly warm and approachable.”
During his cancer treatment, John Wallace returned to his first study of composition and gave one of his last interviews to Vox Carnyx last year to publicise a concert featuring his own arrangements in aid of Glasgow’s Beatson Cancer Charity.https://voxcarnyx.com/2025/02/13/inspired-by-adversity/
Mozart’s Magic Flute, in its story and subject matter and in the libretto of Emanuel Schikander, is very much a piece of its time, which contemporary stage directors often take as licence for the wildest flights of fancy.
Jim Manganello’s production for the young singers currently studying at the Alexander Gibson Opera School has a few of those – rather more than it is possible to keep track of really. With an austere, corporate-looking set and power-suited Three Ladies – whose Queen of the Night has even wider shoulder-pads and an office space that is the design highlight of the staging – where do the street costuming of the Three Boys, Pamina’s odd frock and the reality TV and airport immigration queue references fit in to his concept?
Rather more seriously really, the Monday evening performance got off to a decidedly ropey musical start. Conductor Matthew Kofi Waldren’s opening bars of the overture were very slow indeed and then rhythmically wobbly when the music picks up pace. The performance from the pit did improve, thankfully.
Into Manganello’s “topsy-turvy world”, Fraser Robinson’s Papageno arrives as a carry-out fried chicken delivery man. His consistent performance gave the audience something to cling onto through the show. He was also vocally rather more secure than Haydn Cullen’s Tamino, but in a year group that seems much stronger in the female voices than the men, Joshua McCullough probably took the honours with Sarastro’s demanding bass range.
Of the women, Stephanie Wong transcended her costuming as Pamina and Anna Marmion’s Queen of the Night aria was the highlight of the night. The two trios – Julia Calendar, Qi Liu, and Caitlin MacKenzie as the Ladies, and El Rose Trew-Rae, Elinor Gent, and Mollie Quinn as the Boys – were also very good, as was the chorus.
Like the principals, however, those singers did not always seem comfortable with their stage blocking, and those were not the only aspects of the production a little rough round the edges, not least the peculiar birdbath baptism of Tamino and Pamina at the work’s climax.
After that, Papageno finding his Papagena (Qi Lui again) came as a relief. Although they have some unnecessary challenging movement to execute, the fast-food couple certainly poulet off.
Naturalism has ruled the roost on Scotland’s opera stages for so many years now that it is bracingly refreshing to see a production quite as committed to the director’s concept as this rare Haydn revival featuring the current masters cohort at the Alexander Gibson Opera School.
A triumph at the Esterhazy court in 1773, L’infedelta delusa (Infidelity Outwitted) then disappeared for the best part of a couple of centuries, and – like the rest of Haydn’s opera output for his patron – finds few champions yet.
Rather than recreate the Tuscan countryside which is the composer and librettist Marco Coltellini’s setting, Jamie Manton sets this knockabout tale of love thwarted and restored in a contemporary storage unit with a cast of long-unloved, and uncostumed, dolls. There are nods to both Toy Story and the recent Barbie movie, but his re-imagining goes its own way, especially in Act 2 when our crusading heroine Vespina assumes various disguises to further the (paper-thin) plot. These take the form of outsized doll’s heads, usually worn instead by her brother Nanni in Manton’s staging, leaving soprano Anna Marmion unencumbered to sing.
She and Qi Lui, as Sandrina, the beauty around whom the matrimonial machinations revolve, were the vocal stars of the cast: two contrasting soprano voices perfectly cast for their different roles, and both more comfortably committed to the marionette-like movement vocabulary required. As well as having to master a long recitative and aria score in Italian, with some delicious complex ensembles, Manton’s concept demands a huge amount of activity from his company of five, unattractively garbed and with masses of props. This production is the sort of challenging experience a conservatoire should be throwing at its post-graduate students.
The men, tenors Aidan Thomas Phillips as Sandrina’s father Filippo and Haydn Cullen as his chosen son-in-law Nencio, and bass Fraser Robinson as Nanni, seemed vocally less confident, Phillips’ early command of the recitatives failing later, suggesting he wasn’t fully fit, and both Cullen and Robinson not as secure at the lower end of the range they were required to sing.
That the chaps were also less adept choreographically was less of a problem. In this tale their characters are exposed as hapless, prideful and cocksure, and the women win the day. They have much of the best music too, and Qi Lui’s delivery of Sandrina’s Act 2 aria was particularly memorable, while Marmion’s “old lady” voice was as musically precise as her more passionate singing as the determined Vespina.
Just as crucial, though, was the contribution from the pit orchestra under the baton of the Conservatoire’s current Leverhulme Conducting Fellow, Riley Court-Wood. Whether or not any period instruments were deployed, the musicians contrived a very spritely period sound. The opera was composed around the same time as the japery of Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony and there is a false ending to one of the vocal quintets that prefigures the later “Surprise” Symphony. It is a score of high-quality mid-life Haydn that is well-worth this revival on its own.
The composer subtitled L’infedelta delusa as a “Burletta per musica”, and – although some of the visual references might cause him confusion – it is reasonable to suggest that he may well have approved of the manic buffoonery of this revival.
Competitions are part of the process of becoming a performing musician, a stressful part of the student experience but useful training for the audition and casting world that lies ahead. For the music fan, they can be an altogether more relaxed opportunity to hear music that is a little outside the mainstream repertoire.
The annual Tony and Tania Music Prize at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland has specific qualities that ensure this. Now overseen by the daughter of the couple whose music-filled life endowed it, it focuses on piano or voice on alternate years, and always on the music of Russia, the homeland of Tania’s father.
This year two sopranos, a mezzo and bass competed and the adjudicator was RCS graduate and former Scottish Opera Emerging Artist, Russian baritone Alexey Gusev, so the singers’ grasp of the language was as much under scrutiny as the notes.
Many of the composers were very familiar – Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich all featured – and two, Valentin Silvestrov and Sofia Gubaidulina, are still with us, and the singers responded to the challenge with a vast range of material, even if their brief programmes shared some structural similarities.
Most obviously that was in ending with their most theatrical song. For mezzo Luca-Zsuzsana Cerveni that was the third of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, Trepak. Silvestrov’s I’m Drinking to Mary had showcased the rich low notes of her register, but her two Shostakovich songs, the Eastern folk-music inflected Farewell, Granada, and the sinister Lullaby with its cabaret piano line were the boldest choices.
Soprano Mariana Rybakova Crespo Da Silva also had a farewell song, Glinka’s Farewell to St Petersburg, in her set, its yearning and beautiful piano part from Max McWhirter (who had also accompanied Cerveni) following Rachmaninoff’s lovely Lilacs. The young soprano had opened with the relative simplicity of a traditional Cossack Lullaby (very unlike the Shostakovich) and a Rimsky-Korsakov aria from The Snow Maiden, surely an opera-house audition piece. Her conclusion was two songs from Mussorgsky’s Nursery Cycle, a monologue to a naughty doll and then a lively duet with herself as both nanny and recalcitrant child.
Alex White has the resonant bottom notes in his range to do justice to the most distinctive Russian choral music. His dramatic closer was Anton Arensky’s The Wolves, and the brief Tchaikovsky song that preceded it, My Genius, My Angel, My Friend, was beautifully shaped.
The real treat in his set, however, was his opening trio of three of the nine songs setting Robert Burns by Georgy Sviridov. The familiar cadences of John Anderson, my Jo and Rantin’, Rovin’, Robin were compellingly reimagined by composer and performers (Elina Purina providing the piano), especially the setting of the latter to an Eastern folk rhythm.
In the end, however, there could be little quibbling with Gusev’s decision that the closing performance by soprano Anna Marmion took this year’s prize. Marmion and her pianist Valeri Ayvazyan had the most dynamic relationship of the afternoon, and her voice is already in full bloom. Her thematic linking of her choices perhaps wouldn’t stand close scrutiny but the musical flow from Tchaikovsky’s Sleepless Nights through Rachmaninoff’s Summer Nights to Gubaidulina’s evocative Aeolian Harp, from her 1956 Phacelia cycle, was brilliantly conceived, and her highly accessible closer, Alexander Alyabyev’s The Nightingale, was a showpiece full of bold leaps and stratospheric coloratura.
Marmion has a busy spring to look forward to at the Alexander Gibson Opera School, singing Vespina in Haydn’s L’infedelta delusa next month and the Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflote in March. She’s well worth making plans to hear.
Keith Bruce
Pictured (L-R): Anna Marmion, Alex White, Mariana Rybakova Crespo Da Silva, and Luca-Zsuzsana Cerveni
It would be fruitless to pretend that the Alexander Gibson Opera School’s end-of-term production of Mozart’s pivotal early opera was not compromised by the indisposition of the tenor cast as Idomeneo.
Canadian James Schouten was onstage, and walked, mimed, and occasionally coughed, through the title role, while New Zealander Aidan Thomas Phillips sang the part from the side of the stage. Plaudits to them for their perseverance, but by the end of the night it was clearly a stretch for both, and the brave efforts of their colleagues could do nothing for the skewed balance of Act 2’s beautiful “farewell” trio and the ground-breaking quartet featuring all four main characters in Act 3.
Rehearsals had apparently been dogged by illness, but even if everyone had been well, it would be hard to enthuse about PJ Harris’s production. The imposing set, by Anna Yates, is dominated by “Neptune’s column” a lighthouse-like edifice which contains the god (sung by Joshua McCullough) and is mounted on a rocky plinth which later opens up to become the grotto/allotment of the captive Trojan princess, Ilia (Audrey Tsang). With the upper playing area being home to a collection of props – a safe, a crown, a tomahawk – that are the subject of much distracting stage business, and the restricted space below permitting only processional choreography of chorus and principals, the reason why David McVicar’s Scottish Opera production took a minimal approach to staging the same work was all too apparent. Perhaps all this opaque symbolism referenced a recently-popular fantasy TV series, but if so, so what? And, indeed, why?
Musically the performances were mostly very fine indeed. Tsang was in superb voice from the start – although her better solo music comes later in the score – and Rosie Lavery, dressed in scarlet as Elettra, Ilia’s rival for the affections of Idamante, was even more commanding vocally and the most confident performer onstage, ideally cast for the drama of her solos in Act 3. In a simpler staging, the decision to make Idamante the daughter of Idomeneo, rather than a “trouser role” in the traditional sense, might have seemed more significant, but making it almost incidental may well have been entirely deliberate. Charlotte Bateman sang well, and although her less powerful voice did not match the work of either of her suitors, the three blended beautifully.
The best ensemble work, however, came from the chorus, who also have their best music later in the work, and produced the goods in their eloquent commentary on the shenanigans of their supposed superiors. In the pit, conductor John Butt has the student orchestra as well-drilled as you would expect, while his own harpsichord playing characteristically drives the soloists’ accompagnato to fine narrative effect.
In a remarkable example of serendipity, the first of the four performances of this new “cathedral opera”, composed by Kazakh student Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin as part of his doctorate and marking the 750th anniversary of the birth of Scottish hero King Robert the Bruce, landed on the 100th birthday of the current clan chieftain, Andrew Bruce.
The 11th Earl of Elgin and Kincardine was a guest of honour at the last of the four, in Dunfermline Abbey, where his illustrious ancestor is buried, and he must surely have been well-pleased with this remarkable new work. Abdyssagin, who turned 25 last month, is already a hero in his native land to judge by the air-time given to his work already on Kazakhstan TV. In this performance, however, he shared that status with the dozen young singers from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland who realised his score, and especially tenor Alfred Mitchell who sang the title role.
Not to rain on his parade, but the composer’s claim to have created a new genre of “cathedral opera” is pushing it a bit. What Abdyssagin has composed is to all intents and purposes an oratorio, and one in the established format of organ, choir and soloist, albeit that it was costumed, colourfully and with a healthy quotient of bling, from the Kate Kennedy Trust collection at St Andrew’s University. Britten’s church parables are also a clear antecedent.
Other crucial figures were conductor Lucy Callen and Professor Alan Riach of Glasgow University in the role of poet John Barbour, whose words supplied the libretto. He is also one of a long list of academic advisers the young composer credits as consultants for both the words and the music.
The former were selected from the Early Scots dramatic poem that first chronicled the exploits of King Robert, while the latter was uncompromisingly modern, drawing on contemporary writing for the pipe organ and played with superb fluidity by the composer himself. The power and complexity of the instrumental part was matched initially by Riach’s declamatory recitation and then in the dialogue with the choir, who were as often unaccompanied, with music that was full of challenging intervals and inventive cadences, multi-layered and very demanding.
The same could be said for the solo part which Mitchell tackled with admirable confidence and assurance, revealing a full-toned tenor voice, especially impressive at the top of his range. Abdyssagin had written increasingly complex ornamentation for him as the work progressed, but it was the relatively simple setting of the final couplet – translated by Riach as “Freedom gives solace to everyone, You live at ease when you live free” – that concluded the performance on a gentler and moving note.
It is 35 years since R. S. Silver’s play The Bruce did not materialise at the 1989 Edinburgh International Festival, despite director Frank Dunlop’s enthusiasm for it. A bold promoter would book a Fringe run for this new Bruce and give this year’s programme some meaty tourist-fodder.
Keith Bruce
Pictured: Allan Riach, Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin and Alfred Mitchell with the RCS ensemble
Close your eyes, and the reality that half the musicians in Friday’s RCS lunchtime concert were students and half were seasoned professionals from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Wind Soloists would have passed you by. This was part of the SCO’s Side-by Side initiative with Royal Conservatoire of Scotland students, which has been on the go since 2016 and gives those young pros-in-the-making a first-hand feel for life in the musical fast lane.
Just as there was no compromise on standards, the programme itself smacked of challenge and curiosity. It opened with the wacky world of Darius Milhaud, the fifth of his six pocket-size Chamber Symphonies. To call it short and sweet is but a half truth. Yes, it says all it needs to in about six minutes, but hardly anything it says is sweet. The ensemble acknowledged that in a taut and acerbic performance, encompassing all that is sinister, snappy and sardonic about the composer’s hard-edged style.
Ruth Gipps’ Seascapes effected an immediate sea change. Born in Bexhill-on-Sea in 1921, it’s safe to assume she knew her subject well. The opening, with its liquid imagery however, suggested she’d dashed across the English Channel to consult Debussy. Yet within seconds, a flowering of individual thought emerged, rich in imagery and the resourceful use of instrumental texture. It allowed individuals to shine – the velvety cor anglais for instance, and a myriad of colourful pairings – and gave credence to the programme note’s claim that Gipps deserves to be better known that she is.
Then back to France for the neo-classical effervescence of Jean Françaix’s Nine Character Pieces. They were performed as a continuous sequence, which in itself highlighted the distinguishing charm of each of the succinct movements – a plaintive Amoroso, a rhythmically unnerving Subito vivo, and much more en route to a cat-and-mouse Finale that raced exuberantly to its quasi-operatic conclusion.
The programme ended with Dvorak’s popular Serenade Op 44, in which the winds were infiltrated by an SCO string supplement of cello (Donald Gillan) and double bass (Nikita Naumov). Not everything was smooth sailing – the slow movement took time to find its natural composure – but as the most abundantly-scored of Friday’s works there was gravity in the delivery to match the substantiveness of the score. Not that this cheery Serenade eschews Dvorak’s signature folkish verve, which this energised composite ensemble addressed with no end of spirited enjoyment.
Ken Walton
This programme is repeated at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh on Sun 19 Nov. Full information at http://www.sco.org.uk
Moscow-born and UK-based composer Elena Langer had the suite she made of the music for her Welsh National Opera hit Figaro Gets a Divorce performed by the BBC SSO at Glasgow City Halls on the eve of the pandemic, just weeks after it had been premiered by Maxim Emelyanychev in Seattle.
Nicholas McGegan will conduct a performance of that work with the Cleveland Orchestra in August, and the composer’s ongoing connection with the wider Scottish musical community was cemented this week when the Alexander Gibson Opera School presented a beautifully clear and lively staging of her earlier piece, Four Sisters.
Commissioned by Dawn Upshaw specifically for students to perform, the piece borrows three characters (Masha, Irina and Olga) from Chekhov’s play and transplants them to New York City with a Gianni Schicchi-like plot of the lost will and testament of their deceased father.
His was the final coffin in a procession of them in Max Hoehn’s clever staging of three works for the Masters singers at the Conservatoire. If that was tempting fate, the production survived the gremlins and found a serendipitous context.
Partnering the Langer in the double-bill was Cesar Cui’s A Feast in Time of Plague. Setting a short Pushkin play about London’s 1665 Plague with a group of hedonists partying in the face of the pandemic and in defiance of religious disapproval, it has had a few revivals around the globe prompted by the Covid emergency. That this one played as Boris Johnson faced a parliamentary committee could not have been planned, but that was perhaps some recompense for the wave of illness that afflicted the cast during rehearsals.
That resulted in Masha in Four Sisters being sung from the wings by Northern Irish soprano Rebecca Murphy while an indisposed, and masked, Rosalind Dobson walked the part on stage. Perhaps that prompted the rest of the cast to work a little harder through their own chest infections, but they certainly rose to the occasion. Megan Baker and Hannah Bennett, in the mezzo roles of Irina and Olga, and baritone Ross Cumming as their father’s executor, Krumpelblatt, were a fine ensemble and took their solo arias well, although soprano Marie Cayeux almost stole the show with the Maid’s anti-New York song.
Cumming – as strong a performer here as in the Nyman/Bryars double-bill last year – was the key character in A Feast in Time of Plague as the “President” who sings of the encroaching disease and death as an impetus to enjoy life to its fullest extent. Both pieces mix ensemble work with solos to rewarding effect for the casts, and returning graduate Wiktoria Wizner had the pastoral aria as Mary, while the Gothic visions of Louisa were in the hands of Cayeux.
In the pit, guest conductor Lada Valesova found all the colours in both scores, including some fine harp in the Cui and stretching to swanee whistle in Langer’s fun music. There was a prologue to the double-bill in the form of Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes during which tenors William Searle and Sam Marston and baritone Pawel Piotrowski demonstrated their mime skills with a little narrative of the relationship between old music and new.
Like everything else in this inventive hour and a half of clever work, it spoke as lucidly as it was played, acted and sung, in an evening that was chock-full of parallels and resonances.
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
Those fortunate enough to be in the few distanced audience seats for one of the four performances of Stephen Lawless’s captivating production of Humperdinck’s dark Yuletide confection can count themselves very lucky indeed.
The first live show for a present audience from the Conservatoire’s opera department in nearly two years ropes in many students and younger people from elsewhere in the institution to deliver a version of the story that is full of resonant contemporary detail and slapstick panto fun. It is also superbly sung by everyone involved, and played (in Derek Clark’s reduced orchestration) by a pit band under Adam Hickox – every bit the showcase for young talent across all disciplines that it should be.
The promise of what is to come is encapsulated in designer Adrian Linford’s front-cloth: a German Christmas card of a canal-side scene that includes elements of the Glasgow skyline and a pastiche of Banksy’s graffiti art, sweeping a dead robin out of sight. The whole show is bracketed by the shuffle of a paper-cup carrying pan-handler across the stage – his return at the end, as the reunited family prepare to tuck into a meal of roast Witch, is the sting in the tale.
The Mother here, sung by Lindsay Grace Johnson on opening night, is a harassed NHS worker, struggling to feed her children in a damp-walled flat. “Lord God, send us money, I’ve nothing to live on,” as the surtitles have it, seems pertinently apt. The Witch – tenor Cameron Mitchell, in pink-wigged buxom drag, is TV chef Rosina Leckermaul, promoting her new book, Kochen mit Kindren (Cooking with Children).
The Sandman – a lovely clear-toned Karla Grant – presides over a tableau vivant Nativity that could be the one that can be seen in the city’s George Square but is rather more beautiful, while the Dew Fairy (Marie Cayeux) guzzles shots in a spangly gold mini-dress, having lost a shoe, dragging a traffic cone.
While far from lavish, the staging is full of meaningful detail in every scene, from home with its coin electricity meter and school portraits, through the woods and the gingerbread house, to the Witch’s lair – half TV studio kitchen, half butchering operating theatre. There were a couple of accidental prop mishaps and some sticky and noisy scene-changing on the first night, but all were professionally coped with.
German mezzo Ascelina Klee has a huge voice which sometimes disturbed the balance on stage, but she and Spanish soprano Elena Garrido Madrona are a winning partnership as Hansel and Gretel in performances full of compatible physicality. The role of Father is also double-cast and Jonathan Forbes Kennedy brought a nice bonhomie to counterpoint the grim reality elsewhere.
With an onstage Salvation Army band opening the score, some fine solo playing as well as ensemble from the orchestra, and the women’s chorus singing from the circle in Act 3, the production is full of musical riches as well. If the pandemic rule changes have made it possible for the RCS to release more seats for sale for the second half of its short run, this is a show not to miss.
The thought occurred at the end of this adventurous contribution to the cultural programme around COP26 that it is only in very recent times that such an event has been likely to appear on the schedule of the musicians of Scotland’s national orchestra once again. Before that old hands might wistfully recall the SNO’s Musica Nova seasons at the University of Glasgow for any point of comparison.
The architect and soloist of the programme, Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, will return to play the Stravinsky Violin Concerto with the RSNO in February, but here she was leading a chamber ensemble of RSNO players, with a choir of singers from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland directed by Tim Dean and groups of trombone and double bass students, also from the Conservatoire.
The sequence of music Kopatchinskaja had the RSNO musicians play required a range of talents far beyond their stringed instrument skills, with a great deal of percussion and performance, bowing of wine glasses and a final, rather moving procession of metronomes and night lights, slowly silenced and extinguished.
That conclusion was perhaps the clearest evocation of the environmental crisis that inspired it. More broadly, this Dies Irae, as the violinist entitled the whole evening, was a statement of opposition to the powerful as much as faith in God or humanity. Interleaving movements from the baroque pictures of Franz Biber’s Battalia with George Crumb’s anti-Vietnam War Black Angels was a colourful enough beginning, but that was only a taste of what was to come.
Re-purposing more early music in Antonio Lotti’s Crucifixus motet and John Dowland’s Lachrimae Antiquae Novae on the way, and with those seven trombones prowling the auditorium, the culmination of the evening was Russian Galina Ustwolskaja’s Komposition No.2.
The only woman in Shostakovich’s composition class in her youth, UIstwolskaja lived until the first decade of the new millennium and wrote this, one her most extreme works, in the early 1970s, scored for eight double basses, piano and a large wooden box to be struck with hammers. Kopatchinskaja forsook her fiddle to play the latter, which had been borne onto the stage like a coffin.
The piece is subtitled Dies Irae, but Ustwolskaja’s precise relationship with the Christian faith, during and after the Soviet era, seems unclear. That we were to hear in it a premonition of the end of days was made explicit in the RCS singers following it with Gregorian chant of the Latin, and the entry of all the participants with those randomly clicking metronomes and flickering lights.
I am unconvinced that it added up as a concert programme, but there were some fine ingredients in the contribution of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to COP26 in Glasgow.
Created in partnership with the Global Climate Uprising Festival invented by the LakeArts Foundation of the US, and supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, it was a showcase for a huge student orchestra of some 110 players under the baton of conductor Emil de Cou, and for half a dozen eloquent young activists from Africa, South America and Scotland whose testimonies separated the musical items.
Those young people would not be born when the first UN “Earth Summit” was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. A film from that event prefaced this one, and prompted the thought that the youth of that era are the generation now being berated for their lack of action on the environmental crisis.
Bannockburn’s Natalie Sinclair, in her role as a National Geographic Explorer, gave an account of her research into whale song as the first of the spoken contributions, after Scots violinist Andrea Gajic was the soloist in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Accompanied by a string orchestra from within the huge forces on stage, it was a performance that grew in rhythmic assurance as the year unfolded, the hesitancy of Autumn more or less dispatched by Winter.
The third movement of Debussy’s La Mer and the broad-palette orchestration of the third movement of the Sinfonia Antartica by Ralph Vaughan Williams gave rein to the full forces on stage, when there were impressive contributions from horns, brass and on the hall’s digital organ.
The revelation of the programme, however, was a piece the conductor had brought with him. Advent, by film composer Michael Giacchino, was commissioned to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moonlanding. Post-graduate student Claire Lumsden had the starring role here with the wordless soprano solo throughout the work.
It was an evening where young Scots women like her were consistently in the spotlight. At its start a small group of pipes and drums had been notable for the precision and power percussion of its smallest, and sole female, member, and at its end pop star Natasha Bedingfield’s re-written and fully orchestrated version of her hit Unwritten was distinguished by the backing vocals of Rachel Lightbody, Cariss Crosbie and Emilie Boyd, collectively known as Little Acres.
Charisma, not ego, makes a great conductor. New RCS professor, Martyn Brabbins, tells KEN WALTON how he plans to impart that message
Wilhelm Furtwangler defined the art of conducting as “the sensualisation of the spiritual and the spritualisation of the sensual”. Herbert von Karajan reckoned, like Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God”, that “something just comes, and it’s the grace of the moment”. Then there’s ego. “Of course I’m not modest,” asserted Bernard Haitink. “If I were, I wouldn’t be a conductor!”
These particular exemplars belong mostly to a bygone era, the youngest, Haitink, having only just retired in 2020 while in his nineties. The world of conducting is becoming increasingly democratised. The untouchable demigods are all but extinct. If not yet completely, they will surely be once Covid is licked.
It’s within this seam of change that Martyn Brabbins, musical director of English National Opera and long associated with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (associate principal conductor, 1994-2005), is turning his attention to tomorrow’s professionals. “There’s no place for the dictator,” he believes. “I like it when people’s egos are under control, where there’re able to be a decent human being and collaborate well with the players in front of them.”
As the newly appointed visiting professor of conducting at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, expect him to impress such values on the young hopefuls he takes under his wings. Well-respected by the many major orchestras he has conducted around the world, Brabbins practises exactly what he preaches. Musicians admire him for his slick musical efficacy and no-nonsense efficiency. He knows the score – literally. When orchestras are hit by last-minute conductor call-offs and difficult repertoire needs rescuing, the call invariably goes out: Get Brabbins!
This is not his first association with the RCS. He tutored there when it first began offering conducting courses in the early Noughties. Why come back? “The time is right”, says the 61-year-old, whose own career has taken him from studies in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and winning the 1988 Leeds Conductors’ Competition, to being one of the busiest international conductors on the planet.
Besides his hectic pivotal role at ENO, he is artistic advisor to the Huddersfield Choral Society, a visiting professor at the Royal College of Music, globe-trots regularly (or did so before the pandemic), and is a ubiquitous presence with the UK’s BBC orchestras, especially at the annual BBC Proms.
“I feel I’m in a much better place to impart useful stuff to aspiring conductors compared to how I was 15 years ago,” he explains. “I’ve done a lot of teaching, at the RCM in London, in Orkney [directing the annual conducting courses run in tandem with the St Magnus Festival], and many other bits in between.
“Also, the RCS department is thriving. They’ve had some real successes and they’ve got the new Leverhulme Fellows and a very good Masters course which means the Conservatoire attracts some high level emerging conductors.” Alumni include Ryan Bancroft (principal conductor, BBC National Orchestra of Wales), Kerem Hasan (chief conductor, Tiroler Symphonieorchester Innsbruck) and Jessica Cottis (international freelance and principal conductor, Glasgow New Music Expedition).
RCS alumni Jessica Cottis conducts the Queensland Symphony Orchestra
Equally significant in influencing Brabbins’ decision to return is Michael Bawtree’s appointment last September as administrative head of the department. “In order to make things work you need someone on the ground with whom you have a strong relationship and trust. Michael’s made the whole thing very quickly his own and it’s shaping up in a very positive way,” says Brabbins.
That’s all good and well, but what of the reality of giving these students an “instrument” to practise on? Violinists have their fiddles, flautists have their flutes, but how do you provide wannabe conductors with their very own symphony orchestra?
There will, of course, be opportunities for hands-on experience with the RCS’s own symphony orchestra. That, in itself, has encouraged Brabbins to broaden his involvement with the Conservatoire. “I felt I ought to be a presence for the whole Conservatoire if I could be,” he explains. “So we’ve agreed that, once a year, I will do a concert with the student orchestra, and integrate some of the conducting students in the rehearsal process. The most rewarding and interesting bit of teaching conducting is when you have an orchestra at hand.”
More importantly, Brabbins’ has enormous clout with Glasgow’s professional orchestras, and he’s making full use of it. “I’ve already had very good conversations with the SSO,” he reveals, with the intention of making that relationship beyond what it has been over the past 15 years. “We want to achieve a really good integration, and both sides need to get more from that relationship, ensuring that the orchestra, its management and players have at least some kind of say in who’s chosen by the Conservatoire to be a Fellow. That creates a real sense of ownership.”
It doesn’t stop there. Brabbins has also been speaking to RSNO chief executive Alistair Mackie “so we can embrace the RSNO in all this”. He’s also held talks with Gregory Batsleer, chorus master of the RSNO and SCO, about how to build in experience of choir conducting.
“Gregory feels there’s a big hole, in that many orchestral conductors really don’t have much idea how to approach amateur choruses, and let’s face it, we have a lot of very good amateur choruses in this country. They are an integral part of our musical fabric.
“Get all that in place, do it well, and we’re on course to making Glasgow a leading conducting hub,” he predicts. “My students at the RCM don’t get that level of opportunity.”
All of which is worthless without the right calibre of student, and it’s here that Brabbins’ instinct for the future of the conducting profession really matters. “Post-Covid, things won’t get back to the way they were, and maybe that’s a good thing,” he argues.
“When I was with the BBC Philharmonic last year, chatting to the principal clarinettist, he said: ‘yeah, it’s been wonderful to be shopping local’. He was genuinely pleased that the orchestra, by necessity, had been using UK-based conductors. Maybe musical culture will have to change now, and there won’t be this passionate desire by British orchestras always to seek the next young foreign conductor.”
But even if that does open up more opportunities, it still requires finding the right set of skills for today’s purposes. What does Brabbins look for in his potential recruits? “Some things never change,” he believes. “There are many essentials, but no two people will have the entire combination of these essentials. So when you’re selecting you have to weigh up the strengths.
“There are obvious things, like musical awareness and musical excellence. I remember talking to [Jorma] Panula, the famous Finnish conducting teacher, and his first criteria is that the conductor is a virtuoso, a top class performer. That’s one way of looking at it and an interesting thing to have in your back pocket, but maybe not as crucial as he might think. Charisma, though, is hugely important. It comes in very different guises, but there has to be a very clear and passionate musical desire, a real personality, a real wish to make music in a certain way.”
The days of great dictators are gone, he reiterates. “There has to be a willingness to collaborate. I’ve just been rehearsing the strings here in Cardiff, and you’re to-ing and fro-ing all the time.” That from someone who knows his stuff, gets the results he wants, and always gets asked back.
