Where Puccini envisioned “mythical ancient times” in imperialist Peking as the setting for his final opera Turandot, Sir David McVicar’s new production for Scottish Opera of the composer’s last opera assigns it to the authoritarian brutalism of fascist Italy in the 1920s. The impact is exhilarating and workable at every level, driven by a ferocious energy that never once loses its grip.
It’s clear, from the moment music director Stuart Stratford sets in motion the cold, biting discomfort of the orchestra’s abrupt scene-setter, that Scottish Opera has a supreme hit on its hands. Charles Edwards’ set designs instantly echo the magnificence of the musical score, tempered by signs of physical and moral decay, the latter amplified by a grotesque chorus whose febrile reactions range from bloodthirsty and vengeful to terrified and oppressed. Under McVicar’s meticulous direction every detail matters, every individual action counts.
Such is the human canvas on which the main cast embosses its vital presence, defined of course by the preeminence of its two central characters, Turandot and Calaf. No worries there. Danish soprano Trine Møller projects a refreshingly lyrical Turandot, still dark and aloof in her ruthless campaign of inviting suitors to answer three riddles and having them executed when they fail, but ravishingly transformed by Calaf’s selfless passion.
As Calaf, tenor Victor Starsky exerts remarkable control and expressive range, literally show-stopping in a Nessun dorma that eschews showmanship in favour of its broader dramatic relevance. For both Møller and Starsky, these performances represent their Scottish Opera debuts.
The more familiar face of Hye-Youn Lee portrays the fateful Liù – cursed by her unrequited love for Calaf – with all the agonising loyalty and tender affection the role calls for, ever supportive of Calaf’s ageing father Timur, nobly sung by Insung Sim. Jamie MacDougall is impressively world weary as Turandot’s father, the Emperor Altoum.
Amid the darkness and the tragedy, Ping, Pang and Pong – a whimsically oddball trio of commedia dell’arte-style court bureaucrats – provide a welcome foil, played brilliantly by Josef Jeongmeen, Aled Hall and Luvo Maranti respectively. The choreography is wonderfully madcap, the trio’s satirical purpose well served.
McVicar and Stratford have opted for Franco Alfano’s original ending, one of two versions he wrote when asked to complete the unfinished score after Puccini’s death. The transition after Liù’s harrowing death remains audible, but the driving impetus of this staging, the ripeness of the Scottish Opera Orchestra, and the overall cohesiveness of the production’s acoustical tricks, argue the case convincingly. I challenge anyone not to feel a shiver down the back in the opera’s closing moments.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of this new Scottish Opera Turandot is its unrelenting, thought-provoking captivation. McVicar’s visceral staging, its vivid characterisations and fearless clarity, shines the focus on such issues as victimhood, authoritarianism or power-structured relationships that might seem distant, even inoffensive, in a Chinese fairytale setting, but which hit so much harder when brought nearer to home. It may be 1920s Italy, but there’s a lot happening in today’s global politics that connects us to it.
Ken Walton
Scottish Opera’s Turandot is at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow (25,28 & 31 October), and at Edinburgh Festival Theatre (11, 14, 17, 19 & 22 November). Full information atwww.scottishopera.org.uk
The peculiar circumstances of the Covid pandemic gave a cohort of young singers signed up as Emerging Artists of Scottish Opera an advantageous profile, but not since then have those benefitting from the scheme had as showcasing a start to their tenure as the three sopranos now working with the company.
Hot on the heels of an appearance at the Lammermuir Festival singing Britten’s Les Illuminations, Phaedre and Our Hunting Fathers with the Orchestra of Scottish Opera and conductor Douglas Boyd, Charlotte Jane Kennedy, Charlotte Clapperton and Avery Lafrentz are the major ingredients of the cast of Humperdinck’s Hansel & Gretel, which began the autumn leg of its tour at the Macrobert in Stirling on Thursday evening.
This is an important show for Scottish Opera, and one that looks to the past as much as to the future. Succeeding the four-singers-and-a-piano Opera Highlights tours in which an original, often rather vague, storyline linked a sequence of solos, duets and ensembles, Opera On Your Doorstep presents a pocket-sized version of a full show, with five singers in this instance, including former Emerging Artist baritone Alexey Gusev as Father and another alumnus, Jose Javier Ucendo, the Music Director at the piano.
This harks back to Graham Vick’s Opera-Go-Round when he was with Scottish Opera in the 1980s, an initiative that not only toured obvious candidates like Barber and Cosi but included Jenufa and Don Carlos. The return to Stirling’s Macrobert also recalls the mid-scale touring with a small orchestra that fell by the wayside for financial reasons, but which another Lammermuir show, Britten’s Albert Herring two years ago, inevitably recalled.
This Hansel & Gretel, then, has to tick a lot of boxes, and work in venues as large as the MacBob, The Byre in St Andrews and Pitlochry Festival Theatre as well as community halls on Seil, Benbecula and Skye. In responding to that taxing remit, director Lucy Bradley and designer Janis Hart have come up with a gem of a show.
Although Robbie Butler’s lighting is clever and the prop making and scenic art is exemplary, there is something delightfully home-made about this benign version of the Grimms Brothers’ Fairytale, with its shadow-puppetry and patched clothes. Lafrentz doubles the role of Mother (who has a job as a care-worker, a device which has certainly been seen before) with that of the Witch, and is far from scary as either.
Nor is the overnight stay in the woods by Hansel & Gretel likely to worry small children in the audience, framed as it is by the beautifully-costumed and sympathetic presence of the only company debut, Scots soprano Emily Wishart as the Sandman and the Dew Fairy.
She reappears in the final scene as the vocal-and-dance captain of a locally-recruited posse of children (from Bridge of Allan Primary in this performance) liberated from the Witch’s kitchen after her oven-based demise, which makes up for this staging’s lack of guardian Angels.
The production benefits from a top-notch cast of singers, including Wishart, who is nearer the age and experience of many a previous Emerging Artist. The rest of the cast are vocally more mature and it shows in their ability to blend their voices, especially Charlotte Clapperton’s Hansel and Charlotte Jane Kennedy’s Gretel.
Singing David Pountney’s English translation, their diction – and indeed that of Lafrentz and Gusev as well – could occasionally be sharper, but the theatrical story-telling is so strong that a few lost words hardly matters.
Opera productions that can genuinely be said to be “for all the family” are as rare as hen’s teeth, but this one, just an hour and three-quarters long, including the 20-minutre interval, is exactly that. It is at Peebles Eastgate Theatre on Saturday, tours across Scotland to November 14 and is on the road again in the Spring.
A year ago, baritone Roderick Williams sang Britten’s War Requiem in Hiroshima, one of a global run of performances of the work that included Tel Aviv and Kyiv, marking both 80 years of the end of World War 2 and the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, which falls on December 6 this year.
It was the latter that received due recognition on Friday at the Lammermuir Festival, with Williams on his best form in a late night recital with pianist Christopher Glynn in Haddington’s Scottish Episcopal Church.
Ironic self-deprecation is the lingua franca of musicians, but few deploy it with the charm of this singer and his was the most personal of programmes, finding room for two settings of Blake that he wrote as a teenager to follow Britten’s Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, composed for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the mid-1960s.
Williams, who made his own excellent recording of the cycle, knows the work inside out, and delivers the crucial proverbs with as much panache as the more familiar songs, like The Tyger and the psychological A Poison Tree. His own early works may be musically naïve in comparison but they are very lovely.
As are the four songs by Britten’s mentor Frank Bridge that followed, all from the early years of the 20th century, and appealing art songs that are often very nearly show tunes.
Britten found his own way with traditional and familiar material in the quartet Williams ended with, including The Salley Gardens and a knowingly-delivered The Foggy, Foggy Dew. Williams’ own Bach-inspired arrangement of A Red, Red Rose made a perfect encore.
The recital was presented by Lammermuir as a coda to Scottish Opera’s contribution to this year’s programme, a showcase for three Emerging Artists singing Britten with the orchestra.
These recruits to the company will all shortly be seen in the company’s touring production of Hansel and Gretel, and if their individual dramatic expressiveness in this programme is any guide, that should be well worth catching.
Conductor Douglas Boyd is possibly still remembered in his native Scotland as an oboe player, but he has been exclusively a conductor for 20 years and artistic director at Garsington Opera for much of that time, bringing a memorable Rusalka to the Edinburgh International Festival four years ago.
Directing the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, he began, appropriately, with Arvo Part’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, a brief work that has exceeded its original inspiration (Part admired but never met the British composer) to become a concert hall favourite. It worked brilliantly here not just for its dedication but also its suitability to the acoustic of St Mary’s – Boyd allowing the orchestra’s carefully calibrated strings to build incrementally – and the obvious parallel Part intended with the tolling bell opening of Britten’s final composition, the Phaedra cantata he wrote for Janet Baker.
Almost a mini-opera in itself, mezzo Charlotte Clapperton projected the confessional mix of recitative and song in a committed characterisation. Britten clearly appreciated the story-telling of Robert Lowell’s English version of Racine, and that narrative directness balances the emotional torment conveyed by the music, scored by strings with percussion and harpsichord.
From forty years earlier in the composer’s career, the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers employed the fullest edition of the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, the winds (including alto saxophone) and brass essential to its effectiveness. The challenge it presented to soprano Avery Lafrentz was immense and she dealt with its tricky libretto, assembled and partly written by W H Auden, with aplomb.
There is much in this complex early work – which baffled some in 1936 – that prefigures the War Requiem, but it is structurally much less easy to decode. The scoring for the orchestra, which uses some of the sonic palette of contemporary dance bands, and the demands on the singer, grappling with overlapping texts and exclamations, are virtuosic however, and it made a terrific climax to the concert.
It was the other soprano, Charlotte Jane Kennedy, who had the programme’s most appealing and often-sung work. Les Illuminations, setting a selection of texts by Arthur Rimbaud to string orchestra accompaniment, has the undoubted advantage of being in mellifluous French and is Britten on the road to being a great opera composer.
As often heard sung by a tenor, following Peter Pears’ adoption of the work, the brightness of a soprano – and Kennedy has that quality along with power at both ends of her range – is arguably best suited to the piece, regardless of the homo-erotic message in Being beauteous.
It was noticeable, too, that Kennedy referred less to the music-stand in her performance, but then she had the work that could prove the most useful repertoire addition to a blossoming career.
The first two orchestral chords in the score of Missy Mazzoli’s new opera instantly recall James Bond movies at their Sean Connery peak and Goldfinger in particular. That’s the way to grab the attention of an Edinburgh audience, and make transparent this world premiere’s appeal to a global audience.
The centre pages of the printed programme for The Galloping Cure remember Frank Dunlop, director of the Edinburgh International Festival from 1984 to 1991, who died earlier this year. That is appropriate because this new opera would have sat well in one of his festivals, happy to co-opt circus skills and other Fringe-like ingredients in the service of contemporary opera. The Galloping Cure makes a shameless appeal to the broadest possible audience with its vibrant colour palette, mix of puppetry, dancing and aerial skills, night club lighting and knowing comedy.
From those first chords it looks like a winner. The team that made it – Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek, director Tom Morris, producers Opera Ventures with Scottish Opera and its music director Stuart Stratford – and workshopped its final shape in Scottish Opera’s studios in Glasgow, is substantially the same as the one behind the production of Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves, which premiered at EIF 2019 and has been a hit around the globe.
Although its subject matter, the opioid crisis that strangely seems to be taken more seriously in the US than in Britain, is as dark as the narrative of that earlier work, there is – initially at least – much more levity in this one, not least in the clowning comedy of soprano Catriona Hewitson and baritone Edward Jowle as pet dogs Meg and Sam, a sort of Greek chorus who look to the supertitles to translate their barking, and an actual chorus of sheep, whose dramaturgical role is a less clear.
The story, written by Karen Russell and inspired by a Franz Kafka one, is of a local doctor, Theresa Hart (sung by Daniela Mack) struggling to cope with the ills of the community, including her own daughter, Noy (Gabrielle Turgeon), and grumpy pensioner Ivona (Susan Bullock). When the carousel ride of white-suited Stetson-wearing Lucky Mack (baritone Justin Austin) appears to alleviate everyone’s pain (and the first ride is, of course, always free), Dr Hart is dubious but eventually succumbs and endorses the product.
Allegory is a tricky sell in our cynical age but at first Mazzoli and her associates seem to have achieved a balance between style and substance, combining a difficult subject and entertaining story-telling. As should always be the case with opera, the music, and particularly dynamic, colourful playing from the pit, tells much of the story, and the libretto is simple and effective.
When Mazzoli cedes part of her compositional job to dancefloor-fillers Blume and Lorna Dune (credited with “Beats”) for a rave scene at the end of Act 2, and again during Act 3, much of that impetus is dissipated, and the narrative of the third act – becoming increasing lurid and tragic – also undermines the allegorical tone of the work’s inception.
Addiction (to hobby-horses at home as well as on the roundabout) is now paid for with real body parts (eyes and knees) as the twin threats of street drugs and big pharma are linked with organ harvesting. It is tough to watch as well as being less interesting to listen to. If an extended death scene that may be meant to parallel those in some classic operas had the musical pathos of, say, La boheme, it might have seemed a good deal shorter.
No blame should attach to the performers, however, who are uniformly excellent. Leaving aside the principals from across the pond, of whom soprano Gabrielle Turgeon is the stand-out singer, the cast is full of talent that has been developed by or worked regularly with Scottish Opera in recent years. They deserve the highest praise for their input to a fascinating new work that falls at the last fence.
Further performances Tuesday August 11 and Wednesday August 12
If it is difficult not to miss hearing Voi che sapete and Dove sono sung in Italian, nonetheless it is pretty much inarguable that performing Marriage of Figaro in English makes it more accessible. Even with Amanda Holden’s translation of the libretto, the machinations of Figaro’s parentage and Cherubino’s infatuations are complex to follow.
Sir Thomas Allen’s production of Mozart’s 1787 hit was already very aware of the class war at the heart of the comedy of Figaro’s wedding and it is even more evident in this revival. All that hiding-in-the-same-chair nonsense in Act One becomes an obvious metaphor for the similarity in the amorous attitudes of Count Almaviva and his pretty page, one because he feels his position entitles him, the other caused by raging youthful hormones.
As Edward Jowle’s performance in the title role makes clear, cocksure Figaro is also not without his flaws, never as smart as he thinks he is and too ready to think the worst of his bride-to-be, Susanna (Ava Dodd). Bringing up the houselights for his bitter Act Four aria tries to make all the men in the audience complicit in his self-deception.
Jowle and Dodd have real chemistry together and excellent voices, and Simone McIntosh’s energetic Cherubino is another fine piece of casting, well matched with Kira Kaplan’s Barbarina when she makes her appearance.
It was hard to warm as quickly to Alexandra Lowe’s Countess and Ian Rucker’s Count, she coldly disappointed rather than nursing thwarted passion, he a little stiff and short of heft at the bottom of his range, but that feeling dissipated in the swirl of the action and the building momentum of the ensemble set-pieces.
There were some lapses in clarity in the diction of some of the other principals, particularly in the patter-pace verses, but Scottish Opera’s casting, mixing experienced hands with young talent and new faces with company stalwarts, is up to its usual high standard – and similarly tall in the case of Jowle, Rucker, and Edward Hawkins as Doctor Bartolo.
This is a superb-looking staging (designed by Simon Higlett), with snappy scene-changes and sumptuous period costuming, the one assumed by the Countess and then adopted by Susanna clearly echoing Audrey Hepburn’s in the film of My Fair Lady, with all the associated trappings of pretending to be someone you are not.
Choreography is in the reliable hands of Kally Lloyd-Jones, the chorus moving as precisely as the principals do, and demonstrating as clear a grasp of ensemble coherence.
The bed-rock of the whole production, however, is in the pit where Dane Lam conducts a very characterful orchestra, with natural trumpets and horns, 30-odd strings on sparkling form (notably leading into the septet at the end of Act Two), and the winds to his left full of fine soloists.
Singular praise, however, has to go to Toby Hession for his piano continuo, on the conductor’s right. It is full of delightful witty surprises, enlivening the recitatives and almost commentating on the action. The composer would have loved it.
Keith Bruce
Further performances in Glasgow tomorrow and 15, 17, 20 & 23 May then touring to Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Inverness.
Picture of Simone McIntosh as Cherubino by Mihaela Bodlovic
General Director Alex Reedijk is 20 years in the post as he launches Scottish Opera’s new season. He looks forward and back with Keith Bruce.
As Scottish Opera launches the programme for its 2026/27 season, there are a number of anniversaries to be acknowledged. In descending order of antiquity, they include the 200th anniversary of the death of Beethoven, the centenary of the birth of the company’s founder Sir Alexander Gibson, the 50th anniversary of the death of Benjamin Britten, the 30th anniversary of the first Scottish Opera production by Glasgow’s internationally-renowned opera director Sir David McVicar, and the 20th season of General Director Alex Reedijk.
During a long chat in his office at ScotOp HQ, Reedijk was persuaded to look at the path that brought him to that milestone, but was careful to ensure that the others were all celebrated along the way.
To begin with the season, the headline is that it contains six new productions, which is an impressive figure in comparison with recent years, and that has been achieved with clever husbanding of resources.
As already announced, it begins at the Edinburgh International Festival with Missy Mazzoli’s The Galloping Cure, reuniting the team behind the global hit Breaking the Waves.
“It is already booked to go on to Sweden, San Francisco, Canadian Opera and Adelaide,” Reedijk reveals. “It is a piece that needs to be told, and it speaks to our international standing. Missy Mazzoli is in my view the most important female opera composer in the world today, certainly in the English language.”
Co-commissioned by many of those other companies, and working again with Opera Ventures and the EIF, Reedijk is clear that only that range of partnerships make the budget the piece requires attainable.
The company will also be at the Lammermuir Festival in September as usual, a one-off programme in St Mary’s Kirk, Haddington including Britten’s Les illuminations, Phaedre, and Our Hunting Fathers.
Sir David McVicar’s Scottish Opera career began in 1996 with Mozart’s Idomeneo, and he follows up the hugely successful production of Puccini’s Il trittico with the same composer’s final masterpiece, Turandot, premiered a century ago.
The new staging, with Trine Bastrup Moller in the title role, Victor Starsky as Calaf and Hye-Youn Lee as Liu, has the same creative team as Il trittico and will use the original “Alfano One” completion, with its redemptive extra closing scene.
There are many links to other recent Scottish Opera triumphs in the company’s return to the operas of Handel in February. Alcina will be directed by Olivia Fuchs, who was responsible for last year’s acclaimed The Makropulos Affair, designed by Yannis Thavoris, who created the fine set for Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London in 2024, and lit by Jack Wiltshire, last with the company in the same year’s Albert Herring. With Dmitri Jurowski conducting, the cast includes a company debut from soprano Madeline Boreham in the title role.
The same month, and the same set and lighting, adapted by Thavoris and Wiltshire, will see performances in Glasgow and Edinburgh of Fidelio as Scottish Opera’s contribution to the Beethoven 200 season which also features Scotland’s orchestras. Directed by Ruth Knight and conducted by Kensho Watanabe, it will feature Julia Sporsen as Leonore and Thorbjorn Gulbrandsoy as Florestan.
McVicar’s new Turandot is co-produced with Irish National Opera and will go to Dublin in 2027, and Daisy Evans’ new staging of Madama Butterfly, which was seen there last year, is also a co-production and comes to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness and Aberdeen in May and June next year.
Evans’ work includes Scottish Opera’s Albert Herring and the pandemic-era filmed version of Menotti’s The Telephone as well as the 2023 Edinburgh Festival success, Bluebeard’s Castle. Presenting Butterfly’s familiar plot as the recollections of Kate Pinkerton, her reading of Puccini has been highly praised.
Her design partner Kat Heath also creates the set for a new Cosi fan tutte in Glasgow and Edinburgh that will be cast from the students of the new Advanced Artist Diploma in Opera at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. A partnership between Scottish Opera and the RCS, it will sit alongside the Conservatoire’s Masters degree at the Alexander Gibson Opera School and, in Reedijk’s words, “prepare young singers for the world of work.” The Dunedin Consort’s artistic director John Butt will conduct Rebecca Meltzer’s production.
The next step for some of those young people may be as Emerging Artists with Scottish Opera, and their work always includes an extensive tour to halls and community venues in every corner of Scotland. Once Opera-Go-Round, more recently Opera Highlights, and now Opera On Your Doorstep, it undergoes a radical revision this year with a condensed version of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel hitting the road in Autumn and Spring for 34 performances.
Reedijk sees it as an important development “in the spirit of evolution.”
“I don’t know if the step away from programmes of arias is forever, but it is time for a change. Hansel and Gretel is a good title for a small scale tour, sung in English with piano accompaniment, and an opportunity to have five singers instead of four and a locally-recruited children’s chorus.
As we had already moved from arias to scenes from operas, it is good to go all the way to a full show, within our means.”
As well as the Diploma initiative with singers at the Conservatoire, the opera company is also working with other institutions of further education, including City of Glasgow College, on skills-building in other areas of the creative arts that go into producing opera. Reedijk points out that the company’s head of costume started her career as a costume trainee alongside a cohort of Emerging Artists.
That appreciation of what goes on behind the performances is unsurprising because the man celebrating his 20th season in charge of Scottish Opera began his career as a stage technician.
“I came to the UK in 1984, on the back of working in theatre and opera in New Zealand. My first job was as a stage hand at Richmond Theatre and from there I went to the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). That led to a summer job as head of technical at Assembly Theatre in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1988 and an early introduction to Scottish Opera, because I needed a replica painting for a Fringe show and was put in touch with Kelvin Guy, head of scenic art at Scottish Opera.”
Reedijk’s work then travelled a circuit that became familiar to many working in the arts at the time. William Burdett-Coutts, who ran Assembly at the Edinburgh Fringe was also in charge of Glasgow’s Mayfest, where Reedijk became technical boss, with the same job at Wexford Opera in Ireland falling between the two in the calendar.
Return visits to New Zealand for the biennial pan-arts festival in Wellington led to working on converting a concert hall for opera productions there.
“New Zealand Opera had gone bust and the festival became the only home for opera in New Zealand, initially importing productions from Australia and then creating their own shows, the second of which was David McVicar’s Fidelio, in 1998.”
When NZ Opera was reconstituted, Reedijk was asked to run the company and he remained there until 2006 when the invitation to come to Scottish Opera arrived.
“When I started in February 2006 I never expected to be here as long, but it is a great place: big enough to do major works and small enough to be flexible and recognise that not everything has to be on a three-year cycle.”
Particularly since the arrival of Stuart Stratford as Music Director, whose previous experience also included a lot of work outside of conventional opera houses, Reedijk has overseen a company that has been open to new experiences and experimentation. That approach came into its own during the Covid pandemic when Scottish Opera was leagues ahead in terms of its response to the health emergency.
Reedijk says: “Opera is a very adaptable, robust art form and you can make it work elsewhere than the main stages. My festival technical background gave me the confidence to look at a problem like the pandemic and go for possible solutions.
“Sometimes people travel under the assumption that opera can only be done in a temple of art, but my view is that it is robust enough to be done anywhere. Storytelling through music and theatre is strong enough to be adaptable to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.
“And the company stepped up to the challenge, during what were anxious and frightening times.”
Reedijk’s era has also seen a turn-around from Scottish Opera’s regular trips to the government with the begging bowl, as another whopping deficit threatened the company’s survival.
“Financially, my commitment when I started was that we would move from a position of entitlement to one taking responsibility for ourselves. We are charged to make the best of our circumstances and while those are challenging, it was ever thus. We have to use the resources we have available to make amazing work, and live within our means.
“My job is to hang on the legacy of what Alex Gibson set up for Scotland. It’s hard to start something, very difficult to run it, and dead easy to close it. I’m not having that happen on my watch.”
And how long has that watch to run now? As well as clocking up 20 years, Reedijk has also turned 65.
“Stuart and I have a couple of titles we want to get over the line before the close of the decade. Essential works that the company either hasn’t done in a while or not done at all.
“But I do ask myself if it is time to get out the way. Should I open the door for someone else to come in and set a different vision for the company? There are just a few more things I want to see through.”
Full details of new season at scottishopera.org.uk
Portrait of Alex Reedijk by Kirsty Anderson; Irish National Opera’s Madama Butterfly by Ros Kavanagh
It has become a convenient cliché for cash-strapped companies that the operas of Wagner are best served by minimalist stagings, and Tristan und Isolde is probably the work where that approach is most established.
Concert performances have the huge advantage of the visibility of the orchestra at work, and – especially in this one – those crucial moments when the musicians, singers as well as players, are not visible, but audible from offstage.
In fact this staging was much more than a concert, fully costumed in quasi-medieval style by Scottish Opera’s Lorna Price (in her last show before moving to Glyndebourne), directed by Justin Way, and performed on an apron stage built out from the platform. A second conductor (Toby Hession) was working for the singers from a specially-constructed prompt box, to supplement main man Stuart Stratford’s video-relayed direction on the podium behind them.
If it was a compromise, it was a hugely successful one. There was just one moment in Act 3 when tenor Gwyn Hughes Jones struggled to make himself heard over the swell of the score, and the balance between singers and orchestra, off-stage and on-stage elements, solo instrumental voices and ensemble precision (particularly all sections of the strings and Sue Baxendale’s horns) was nigh-on perfect all night.
Tristan und Isolde is remembered for its set pieces – the Act 1 Prelude and Act 3 Liebestod and the rapturous duet of Act 2 – but those are part of a narrative flow of music that was, and should still sound, revolutionary, as it did here. Stratford’s shaping of the whole work, every note serving the story-telling, was always captivating; longeurs were there none in over four hours of music.
The cast had lost its King Marke – Richard Wiegold, a veteran in the role, stepping in – and was vocally superb from title roles to the smaller parts, and not excepting the boisterous twenty seamen of the male chorus in Act 1.
Katherine Broderick was imperious as Isolde, consistently delivering those high notes in Wagner’s demanding music from her first entrance to the final scene, seemingly without effort. If the voice was astonishing, the nuances of her acting performance were just as remarkable. This was a fully realised, and deeply flawed, Isolde.
Matching her was mezzo Khatuna Mikaberidze’s Brangane, similarly characterful and powerfully sung, allied to accomplished handling the staging’s few essential props.
If Gwyn Hughes Jones initially seemed to be holding something back, his stoic, even cynical, performance also hinted at an intriguing Tristan that never quite emerged. Perhaps that ambiguity was deliberate, however, as a counterbalance to the ebullient loyal enthusiasm for his master from his batman, Kurwenal – a terrific turn from Korean baritone Hansung Yoo.
Leaving the hall’s platform to the orchestra, the principals made all their entrances and exits to their playing area via the stage-side auditorium doors, and a plinth that incrementally lost sets of steps on either side to become Tristan’s death-bed in Act 3 was the only additional staging. It was also the excuse for the only slacking of pace in the drama when Hughes Jones or Weigold sat on it and there was a suspicion that it was not their characters who were taking the weight off their feet.
For those of us sitting out in the auditorium, this was a five hour feast (including two longer intervals) that passed with remarkable swiftness. The suggestion is that the company plans more Wagner presented in similar style in seasons to come, and that is an enticing prospect.
Keith Bruce
Picture: Khatuna Mikaberidze as Brangane and Katherine Broderick as Isolde, credit Christopher Bowen
After a thinner programme last year, the Edinburgh International Festival boasts a return to full strength on the road to its 80th anniversary celebrations next year, writesKEITH BRUCE.
Orchestral residencies from the Los Angeles and Berlin Philharmonics and Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and the world premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s new post-pandemic opera The Galloping Cure are headline attractions in the full Edinburgh International Festival programme for August 2026, unveiled today.
The Mazzoli opera follows the acclaimed Breaking the Waves at EIF 2019 and reunites the composer with librettist Royce Vavrek, stage director Tom Morris and conductor Stuart Stratford in a production from Scottish Opera and Opera Ventures.
The cast is headed by Argentinian mezzo Daniela Mack, British soprano Susan Bullock and German baritone Justin Austin.
It joins the already-announced Zurich Opera production of Verdi’s A Masked Ball, a revival of Adele Thomas’s acclaimed 2024 staging, as the staged operas bookending the programme at the Festival Theatre.
Operas in concert at the Usher Hall are Mozart’s Don Giovanni from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Maxim Emelyanychev, with Konstantin Krimmel as Giovanni, Louise Alder as Donna Anna and Brindley Sherratt as the Commendatore, and Strauss’s Elektra from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Karina Canellakis with Irene Theorin in the title role, Vida Mikneviciute as Chrysothemis and Nina Stemme as Klytamnestra.
The Festival has a focus on work from across the Atlantic and its theme, All Rise, is the title of Marsalis’s epic Symphony No 1, whose 12 movements will be the Opening Concert at the Usher Hall on Saturday August 8, teaming the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and its founder, featured soloist and composer with the RSNO, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers, under the baton of James Gaffigan.
During the following week, the orchestra plays Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige with conductor Chris Crenshaw and then gives two concerts on the evening of August 12 with Yuja Wang at the piano in what is a world premiere collaboration. Marsalis, who is married to Festival director Nicola Benedetti, with whom he has a daughter, has recently announced that he will step down as artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in the summer of next year.
The LA Phil residency comes in the final year of its conductor Gustavo Dudamel’s tenure as Music Director. Three concerts include two Beethoven symphonies, Nos 7 and 6, and a family concert teaming the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles with Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise musicians.
Zurich Opera brings Verdi’s A Masked Ball
The Berlin Phil and conductor Kirill Petrenko close the Festival on Sunday August 30 with Scriabin’s Symphony No 3, preceded by Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with soloist Augustin Hadelich. The previous evening the programme is Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4. A sextet from the orchestra gives the Queen’s Hall chamber music recital on the morning of Saturday August 29.
Other highlights at the Usher Hall include two concerts by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, the first of which is a rare modern-day performance of the full three-hours of Coleridge-Taylor’s The Song of Hiawatha with the Festival Chorus and tenor Nicky Spence among the soloists, and Sir Donald Runnicles conducting his old friends the BBC SSO and the Festival Chorus in Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, with soloists including mezzo Catriona Morison.
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra is in the pit at Edinburgh Playhouse for the visit of San Francisco Ballet. The European premiere of choreographer Aszure Barton’s Mere Mortals is danced to a score by Floating Points (Sam Shepherd), conducted by Martin West.
Colin Currie and his group play an all-Steve Reich programme, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London celebrate the Golden Age of Hollywood, and Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI perform an Atlantic-spanning early music programme.
A day of Bach at the Usher Hall on Saturday August 22 starts with an invitation to “Come and Sing” Chorales, and has Alisa Weilerstein playing all the cello suites and pianist Vikingur Olafsson giving a late evening concert.
There is a tribute to the late Scottish trumpeter John Wallace from the band he founded, The Wallace Collection in partnership with the Cooperation Band and musicians from all three Scottish orchestras under conductor Clark Rundell, and the Queen’s Hall programme includes a tribute to pianist Alfred Brendel in three recitals of music associated with the great stalwart of Festivals past by Steven Osborne, Paul Lewis and Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
Debuts at the Queen’s Hall include those of mezzo Beth Taylor and guitarist Sean Shibe and that series opens with Dunedin Consort performing Tansy Davies’s new work Passion of Mary Magdelene with Anna Dennis and Marcus Farnsworth. Scottish Ensemble combines forces with small-pipes virtuoso Brighde Chaimbeul in another world premiere collaboration.
A full jazz, traditional music and folk programme at the EIF’s Royal Mile home, The Hub also includes Benedetti’s Classical Jam and a return visit from the global stars of the Aga Khan Music Programme.
Introducing her fourth Festival, Benedetti said: “Marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, we put America firmly in the spotlight. The American story is filled with innovation and ingenuity, perseverance and prejudice – tensions that have fuelled some of the most extraordinary artistic achievements in history.
“Our 2026 Festival is an invitation to All Rise together, and in doing so we celebrate not only artistic excellence but the resilience and flourishing of the human spirit.”
Tickets for EIF 2026 are on sale from noon on Thursday March 26 with priority booking for members and friends opening a week earlier. Full details at eif.co.uk
Picture of Zurich Opera’s A Masked Ball by Herwig Prammer; Nicola Benedetti and Wynton Marsalis by Carl Bigmore
There’s no denying the ambition behind The Great Wave, a substantial full-length opera by composer Dai Fujikura and librettist Harry Ross that aims to project the extraordinary biography of 18th/19th century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai as a universal embodiment of the creative spirit. At Thursday’s premiere of this undeniably bold co-production between Scottish Opera and Japanese concert agency KAJIMOTO (it travels to Tokyo after a mere four Scottish performances across Glasgow and Edinburgh) such dual ambition struggled to justify its two-hour presence in our lives.
Hokusai’s iconic Ukiyo-e printmaking and book illustrations effectively revolutionised the industrial scale commercialisation of art. He is best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a dynamic man-against-nature, Persian blue image of fishermen battling a mountainous wave with Mount Fuji stoically set in the background. It later inspired Debussy’s La Mer, not to mention the popular Apple emoji for “wave”. Somehow, the image’s symbolic omnipresence in this production reflects more the opera’s resistance to momentum than any promise of compelling magnetism.
The Great Wave begins with Hokusai’s death, the lengthy silence surrounding his coffin broken by the devotional keening of his daughter Oi (soprano Julieth Lozano Rolong) and the release of his spirit musically scented by the ethereal breathiness of the Shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese flute. Episodes in his long life – he died approaching 90, was struck by lightning on two occasions and expected to live to 110 – are revisited in a sequence of flashbacks that attempt to substantiate his creative immortality.
Some magical elements emerge in the process. By and large, Satoshi Miyagi’s stage direction is sharply expressive, stylised in a quasi-ritualistic sense, softened by genuinely compassionate interactions, if prone to weird bouts of silliness. Odd snatches of humour are underplayed or too compartmentalised to produce much more than a hesitant audience titter.
Similarly Akiko Kitamura’s choreography makes effective use of the cast’s professional dancers and mechanically-synchronised chorus, but submits now and again to self-caricature. More consistent, and aligning persuasively with Miyagi’s figurative simplicity, are Junpei Kiz’s vivid set designs and their interaction with Sho Yamaguchi’s morphing video effects and Kayo Takahashi Deschene’s mono-toned costumes.
What disappoints repeatedly, though, is the impotency of Fujikura’s vocal writing and his struggle to sustain organic development: that sense of prolonged musical journey, of heightening lyrical tensions, of inevitably reaching a destination. That, in itself, may have accounted for some inconsistent performances on opening night.
As Hokusai, Daisuke Ohyama struggled to project his lower register, but had no problem with the hysterical falsetto that animated a rather manically divergent scene about a “smelly fart”. After a shaky start, Lozano Rolong’s Oi grew in confidence. Tenors Shengzi Ren (doubling as Mr Tozaki and Hokusai’s publisher Yohachi) and Luvo Maranti (the artist’s grandson), along with Chloe Harris as Hokusai’s second wife Koto, provided the most sustained and memorable performances. Edward Hawkins (Toshiro) and countertenor Collin Shay (von Siebold) were relatively incidental, but needful presences nonetheless.
The Chorus, engineered in a blunt reactive fashion, delivered a gutsy compulsive edge, purposefully motivated despite the occasional and repetitive banality of their bullet-point utterances. At one point, joined by children’s voices, an ecstatic leaning to Benjamin Britten informed one of The Great Wave’s most uplifting scenes.
But the winning key element of this new opera is surely to be found in the orchestra pit, where music director Stuart Stratford and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera issue a side to Fujikura’s creativeness that really does sing. His orchestral score harnesses a passion and narrative momentum absent from much of the vocal writing, presenting a captivating menagerie of detailed, magical imagery that rides atop a thrusting cinematic undercurrent. It’s just not quite enough to offset the weaknesses of substance and prolixity that surround it.
It’s worth mentioning, too, that Thursday’s opening performance was dedicated to the memory of Scottish Opera founder Sir Alexander Gibson, born 100 years ago this month. Who knows what he would have made of The Great Wave? At the very least he would have applauded the sincerity of the effort bravely undertaken by a company he loved.
Ken Walton
Further performances of The Great Wave are at the Theatre Royal Glasgow (14 February) and Edinburgh Festival Theatre (19 & 21 February)
The Orchestra of Scottish Opera summons a tangible sense of release when given the opportunity to feature centre stage rather than customarily hidden within the cloistered confines of the orchestra pit. Such euphoria was manifest in Ayr Town Hall on Wednesday, where the players were in full view for an Operatic Gala concert that coasted its way through a sequence of sundry operatic excerpts ranging from Mozart to Puccini.
Swedish conductor Tobias Ringborg had no less a part to play, visibly consumed by the music, yet relaxed enough to give the band sufficient leeway to steer its own course through the more detailed expressive niceties. It was these nuances – reactive and instinctive support to the spontaneous whims of the evening’s vocal double act – that introduced a sense of adventure to mostly well-known operatic numbers.
That double act consisted of former Scottish Opera Emerging Artists Catriona Hewitson (soprano) and Ross Cumming (baritone) featuring variously in tandem as duettists, and individually in solo arias. Bristling with personality, their performances – if occasionally subsumed by the heft of the orchestra – oozed charm and instant adaptability.
Music from just two operas took us up to the interval: Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. It provided a neat complement, the graceful good humour of Mozart thrust viciously aside by the restive bombast of Donizetti. The respective overtures brought mixed results, the orchestra more at home with the fulminating Pasquale than the rakish precision of Figaro. It was the starry adaptability of Hewitson and Cumming, self-assured in their animated characterisations, that captured the moments.
The second half introduced a wider miscellany. From Gounod’s Faust, the wild exuberance of Phryne’s Dance and sweet-scented Dance of the Trojan Women set the scene for Cumming’s noble vision of Valentin’s Act II aria Avant de quitter ses lieux. Howitson responded with the joyous gymnastics of Je veux vivre from the same composer’s Roméo et Juliette. This French segment ended with Ernest Guiraud’s orchestral Suite No 1 from Bizet’s Carmen, the seductive spirit of the music more consistently conveyed than some of the instrumental detail.
Thereafter, the focus shifted to Italy, firstly in a pairing of Puccini arias that occupied either end of the popularity scale. Love’s frustrations found a lofty emotional outlet in Cumming’s rapt performance of the lesser-known Questo amor, vergogna mia from Edgar, an early Puccini opera often considered his “biggest flop”. Gianni Schicchi’s O mio babbino caro, on the other hand, required no justification. Hewitson’s unaffected delivery bowed respectfully to its natural and popular appeal.
Lusciousness prevailed in the instrumental Intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, before the duettists struck up a whimsical show stopping finale with Quanto amore from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. Except that wasn’t the end. It was back to Mozart for a well-earned encore, the instantly recognisable duo La ci darem la mano from Don Giovanni.
ALTHOUGH both Madama Butterfly and La boheme are essentially intimate personal tragedies, there is little doubt that Puccini intended wider resonance than their domestic settings. Both have proved perennially popular, but while the former has invited epic reinvention on the opera stage as well as in Boublil and Schonberg’s Miss Saigon (and more recently David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly), the latter, notwithstanding the musical RENT, has tended to be a staple of smaller-scale productions.
Happily, the Canadian direction and design team of Andre Barbe and Renaud Doucet gave the work a proper full-fat production for Scottish Opera in 2017 and this revival seems even sharper. It is framed by the slightly distracting conceit of being in the imagination of a present-day tourist to Paris, but that device undoubtedly works to the ambitions of universality that the production and the composer share.
The bulk of the action takes place in the “Jazz Age” of the 1920s, and the parallels between the lives of the haves and have-nots then and that gap a century later scarcely need underlining. In the world of these characters, the source of no-one’s money is a mystery, old sport.
The long contemporary scene grafted on to the front of Puccini’s score segued, with pitch-perfect precision, from a recording into a live performance of the overture, and it was immediately apparent that the orchestra, under the baton of Scottish Opera’s music director Stuart Stratford was on board for the fully-realised production. The rich, sumptuous sound from the pit was perfectly balanced by the Onstage Banda, with Puccini’s specific scoring further enhanced by a solo interlude from accordionist Djordje Gajic before Act IV.
The transition that made the production, however, came between the first two acts, when the chilly apartment of the four artists was swept away by a streetscape incorporating much more than Café Momus, with puppets, fairground rides and an art gallery all gloriously populated by an immaculately-drilled chorus of adults and children.
The stage craft on display there is emblematic of the production, superbly lit by the directorial partnership’s regular designer Guy Simard, where everyone knows exactly where they have to be at every moment.
That standard of excellence ran through the cast of principals, with Hye-Youn Lee returning as Mimi and giving a performance as moving as it is beautifully sung. Guatemalan tenor Mario Chang made a memorable company debut as Rodolfo, and the ensemble strength included a very carefully characterised Marcello from Roland Wood and Rhian Lois giving her Musetta an equally thoughtful portrayal. One of the current cohort of Scottish Opera Emerging Artists, Edward Jowle added another feather to his cap as the musician, Schaunard.
Keith Bruce
Touring to His Majesty’s, Aberdeen (Oct 30, Nov 1); Eden Court, Inverness (Nov 6 & 8); Festival Theatre, Edinburgh (Nov 14, 16, 18, 20 & 22)
Picture of Rhian Lois as Musetta by Mihaela Bodlovic
With its community-run pub, The Black Bull, next door, Gartmore Village Hall in the Trossachs has the atmosphere of some of the further-flung venues that Scottish Opera’s small scale touring operation reaches, like the early November dates in Lochinver and Glenuig on this current outing.
It beggars belief that Kenneth MacLeod’s late-20th century office set, complete with watercooler and Mac Classic computers, fits into the small van that has traditionally been used for these excursions, and its quality of build and attention to detail speaks of the ambition of this iteration of the project once known as Opera-Go-Round.
No longer a sequence of party pieces with a few rarities to add spice, Opera Highlights has become a directed show (Emma Doherty this time out) that links extended excerpts from three operas and all of a fourth (Barber’s A Hand of Bridge) in an invented scenario – a farewell bash in the retro-office during which all manner of interpersonal relationships come to light.
It’s fun – if never quite funny enough as yet – but not the main point of the exercise, which is to give four young singers and a hard-working repetiteur at the piano (Meghan Rhoades, one of three of the current cohort of Scottish Opera Emerging Artists involved) the opportunity to strut their stuff, and to fly the national company’s flag outside of Scotland’s big cities.
The mission of taking proper singing to Crail and Nairn and Castle Douglas and Castlebay is admirably accomplished. Baritone James Geidt opens proceedings as Tonio from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and later takes the role of Silvio, while tenor Luvo Maranti plays cuckolded Canio and gets the big aria that closes the first half.
Soprano Ceferina Penny, making her company debut, comes storming out the blocks as Gounod’s Juliette – and the departing colleague in the workplace scenario, which is established with Maranti as Romeo and mezzo Chloe Harris doubling as his page Stephano and her nurse, Gertrude.
As everything is sung in good English translations (Bill Bankes-Jones, Amanda Holden and David Pountney among the wordsmiths), the office setting is believably maintained, with the Barber an interlude at the party that is inventively echoed in the sequence of selections from Strauss’s Die Fledermaus that brings the whole show to a suitably champagne-fuelled climax.
The quartet really comes into its own as a group then, and the most accomplished performer, from the moment she swaps her trainers for work shoes under the office computer-desk at the start to her drink-fuelled Chacun a son gout, is Harris. She also has the best of the evening’s outliers in the Letter scene from Massenet’s Werther, duetting with Penny, and an aria from Handel’s Alcina.
Perfect though the use of Haddington’s Corn Exchange proved for Britten’s Albert Herring at last year’s Lammermuir Festival, Scottish Opera’s return to St Mary’s for its 2025 contribution was both necessary and welcome.
Primarily that was for musical reasons, and the superb playing of the full Orchestra of Scottish Opera for Maurice Ravel’s L’heure espagnole and William Walton’s The Bear, under the energetic baton of Alexandra Cravero. The Ravel, of course, is packed with delightful orchestral detail. The story of the convoluted love-life of Concepcion, the fickle wife of clockmaker Torquemada, had every possible expression of the passage of time, with onstage metronome, ticking percussion and chiming bells most obvious.
The score of The Bear proved no less fascinating, and as it includes knowing nods to other composers, including Debussy and Britten, it is far from unlikely that Walton had the early work in mind as well. This is the playful Walton of Façade rather than the composer of the more problematic Troilus and Cressida.
In putting the two works together, the company was also making use of its resident company of Emerging Artists, and regular soloist Jamie MacDougall – and had the added impetus of producing a staging that will work in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal and Edinburgh Festival Theatre during the autumn season.
That will mean an expanded scenic design, but it was clear that the essential elements are already in place in Kenneth Macleod’s work for Jacopo Spirei’s production.
It paid to pay close attention to the supertitles in L’heure espagnole, which faithfully rendered the jokes being delivered in French by the cast. Lea Shaw’s knowing performance as Concepcion had the lion’s share of these and she played them to the hilt, matched by Edward Jowle’s broad portrayal of lustful banker Don Inigo.
South African tenor Luvo Maranti probably got more laughs though, for the poetic attempts by his character, Gonzalve, to play up the role of romantic lover, while baritone Daniel Barrett caught just the right tone for the naïve Ramiro, in a production that was not really about subtlety at all.
Making good use of the whole performance space in a way that was new to Scottish Opera’s work in the venue, there was a lot going on, but then that is exactly what farce is all about.
The premise of The Bear might be just as absurd – what purpose can a widow have in trying to punish her faithless husband by refusing any human interaction herself after his death? – but its source in a short story of Chekhov means we are in a very different world.
Barrett, making his Scottish Opera debut as a new recruit to the team of Emerging Artists, was superb as the titular Bear, a boorish creditor of the dead man who finds himself falling for the widow. Chloe Harris, as bereaved Yelena Ivanovna Popova, also gave a nicely-measured performance, and a definitive reading of the evening’s hit tune – the mezzo party-piece, I Was A Constant, Faithful Wife.
Keith Bruce
Repeated at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, October 18 and 22 and Edinburgh Festival Theatre, November 15.
Picture of Daniel Barrett and Chloe Harris in The Bear by Sally Jubb
Director Jacopo Spirei tells KEN WALTON why his new Double Bill production for Scottish Opera, opening at Lammermuir Festival, has all the quirky trappings of a Netflix series.
Ready for a double dose of black comedy? That’s what Scottish Opera is promising in an upcoming operatic head-to-head that packages Ravel’s waspishly satirical L’heure espagnole with the Chekhovian darkness of Walton’s The Bear. This new Double Bill production, created by Italian opera director Jacopo Spirei, takes the opening night spot (4 Sep) at this year’s Lammermuir Festival, a one-off performance in St Mary’s Church, Haddington, with later repeats in Glasgow (18 & 22 Oct) and Edinburgh (15 Nov).
Written over half a century apart – Ravel’s sensuously-scored, Spanish-flavoured one-acter was premiered in 1911; Walton’s parodic burlesque a nippy child of the mid-sixties – their mutual compatibility may not seem immediately obvious. Spirei, while absent from the initial decision to couple them, has no such qualms. “Musically there’s a good relationship, both being experiments from otherwise symphonic composers,” he argues. “And from a theatrical point of view, these are both stories of strong independent women within the context of a man’s world: women that define morals in their own very specific way. Treating them as comedies was a clever way of doing it.”
L’heure espagnole is often viewed as an Ayckbourn-style bedroom farce, a clockmaker’s lascivious wife using the convenience of her lustless husband’s clocks to conceal her multiple lovers – opera buffa reborn. The Bear occupies a darker world, the recently-widowed Popova learning of her late husband’s infidelities and mountainous debts, only to fall for the messenger, a ruthless debt collector.
L’heure espagnole – “a world of fantasy among ticking clocks” (Photo Sally Jubb)
Spirei has previously produced both operas apart – in studio settings in Copenhagen – but never in tandem. The Bear on that occasion was paired with Bruno Maderna’s modernist 1973 chamber opera Satyricon. “That demanded a very different co-relationship which led to treating the Walton more like the Chekhov play it’s based on.”
“The trick in making it work with the Ravel is to put them in dialogue”, says Spirei. “Think of a Netflix series like Black Mirror, where similar themes are treated in completely different ways. The way I work with the designer [Kenneth MacLeod] is to emphasise the contrast. So you have one opera that is incredibly colourful and full of life, and one that moves at completely the other end, which is a funeral parlour: from colour, colour, colour to classic black comedy. In a way the humour is similar, but one is a very particular French opera, the other very English. That creates a very exciting dialogue.”
That applies equally to the music, he explains. “Walton’s is a lot more rhythmic in a way. The percussive element is much more predominant, his way of setting words is exceptional, unparalleled in the 20th century. It’s fascinating how it feels like a play, yet is an opera. And it’s very quirky, fascinatingly surreal. A bit like Fawlty Towers.
“On the other hand, a sense of orchestrated landscape distinguishes Ravel’s writing. You do feel you are suspended in a world of fantasy among ticking clocks. The way he paints the nuances, however, points to an extraordinary creative depth.”
Above all, Spirei is having fun, and Scots-based designer Kenneth MacLeod is playing along, especially where the challenge has been to create a design solution flexible enough to meet the demands both of this week’s Haddington church setting and future theatre performances.
“To exist anywhere it sort of needed a visual environment that was valid everywhere, something universally familiar like an internet browser. We’re so used to this idea, all those streaming platforms. With the church, however, we’ve taken a slightly more site-specific approach, using the wider space to full advantage.”
The cast are up for anything, he adds, a potent mix of youth and experience. “Some are Scottish Opera Emerging Artists, some former Emerging Artists.” Then there’s Jamie MacDougall, a seasoned regular in comic roles for the company, playing duped husband Torquemada in the Ravel. “Oh my God, how can you stop him? He’s extraordinary, like a film actor,” insists Spirei.
While this production marks Spirei’s debut with Scottish Opera, it’s also a chance for the 50-year-old Italian to finally honour the memory of his close friend and mentor, Sir Graham Vick, who served as director of productions at Scottish Opera in the 1980s, creating many momentous – some highly controversial – productions in the process.
“That’s one of the reasons I said yes to coming here,” he reveals. “I wanted to reconnect with that part of Graham’s past. For me he was a mentor as well as a teacher. I started working with him when I was 26. We worked together for a long time, then I started directing my own stuff, we became good friends and remained close till the end. He was one of these people you could exchange ideas about process, about work – a mentor in the true sense.”
Remembering Graham Vick
Vick, who went on to found the Birmingham Opera Company in 1987, establishing its award-winning policy of staging groundbreaking productions in unusual venues, died in 2021, aged 67. Did the young turk who ruffled the feathers of traditional Scots opera-goers in 1985 with his infamously lavatorial Don Giovanni temper his aesthetic in later years?
“Yes, in a way he later found a different field of research,” Spirei believes. “It was no longer about provoking audiences, more about involving the widest of audiences. His work in Birmingham, for example, oriented in that way, working with volunteers from all paths fo life. That led to a period of very aesthetic theatre in the 1990s and early 2000s, to a lot of beautiful looking shows, still always gripping and cutting, but with a slightly more pleasing edge. He just found a different path and started questioning the future of opera, how it needed to be to function within society. In that way I always found myself at home working with him.”
How confident is Spirei in opera’s future? “The art form is fine,” he insists. “Let’s face it, opera has been declared dead ever since I started in the business, yet it’s still healthy and strong, finding its way through new compositions, new repertoire. The problem is never the art form. The art form has an energy and power of its own – it just has to be released.”
Scottish Opera presents its Ravel/Walton Double Bill at St Mary’s Church Haddington on 4 Sep as part of the Lammermuir Festival. The 2025 Festival runs from 4-15 Sep at various venues around East Lothian. Full details at www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk
At the March launch of the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival programme, the Festival’s Head of Music, Nik Zekulin, conceded that the opera content was slighter than in other years.
On paper that may have looked the case, but the reality has felt rather different, and not only through the presence of opera in concert. Whether it inspired or consoled, or simply wore you down, the Festival opener, Tavener’s The Veil of the Temple, was in many ways operatic in scale and style. Its structure, in less epic form, found echoes in both the works presented as staged operas in the Festival programme, even if their music was very different.
With no opera at all in the Festival Theatre, given over to runs of theatre and dance productions, the big event was the use of Edinburgh Playhouse for Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, recreating an Opera Australia production by the director of physical theatre company Circa, Yaron Lifschitz, and his troupe.
Soprano Samantha Clarke, who sang Eurydice and Amor, personified this venture in that her career bounces between Australia and the UK. The Australian performers were joined on stage by the Chorus of Scottish Opera, whose set-builders also made the staging, and Handel specialist Lawrence Cummings conducted the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the pit.
Clarke was excellent, as were the chorus, but the star vocal turn of the show was counter-tenor Iestyn Davies, an EIF favourite who sang with extraordinary power and also engaged with the physical action, if not to quite the personally perilous degree the superbly-choreographed acrobats displayed.
Far from being in any way gimmicky, they told the story as eloquently as the text and music, from the dramatic trapeze descent of Eurydice to the Underworld to a nicely ambiguous interpretation of Gluck and librettist Calzabigi’s grafting of a happier ending on to the classical tale.
Although none of the forces involved were huge, the production needed the vastness of the Playhouse, and – just as importantly from the EIF’s point of view – attracted an audience that filled all of the seats.
Ancient Chinese myths inspire Huang Ruo’s opera, confronting humanity’s complex relationship with nature.
It is more debatable whether Huang Ruo’s Book of Mountains and Seas was any more “opera” than The Veil of the Temple had been. If one of the delights of the Gluck had been the realisation of the rich orchestration, Ruo’s music is sparer, if never quite as austere as Tavener’s often was.
The Chinese-born American resident is a composer of operas – and it will be interesting to see if this work was paving the way for an EIF run of a larger work – but this was a work for chamber choir and puppetry, using four of the ancient Chinese stories from the titular book.
Basil Twist, designer of the National Theatre’s Studio Ghibli adaptation My Neighbour Totoro, was director and his puppetry is of the modern school familiar from The Lion King and War Horse, and in the global perambulations of Little Amal and The Herd. If not so gasp-inducing, his six-strong team, who created galaxies of lantern suns, a bird princess, an archer god and a sprinting giant, supplied the parallel technical expertise to the Circa team in the Gluck.
The dozen singers of Ars Nova Copenhagen were in the Theatre of Voices mould, and directed by counter-tenor from that ensemble, Miles Lallemant. The constant flow between the male and female voices and between honed ensemble and some glorious solo singing was compelling, and Ruo’s music is delightfully hard to pin down, with a global range of influences but a voice entirely his own.
Often the most identifiably “Chinese” element of the sound came from the two percussionists, the only instrumental content and played with quite startling virtuosity. Even there, however, there were Latin American and African elements in what was truly the sound of “world music”.
Not so very long ago, the activities of Scottish Opera were siloed so that the most a young musician recruited to the Emerging Artist programme might expect beyond the perennial four-singers-and-a-piano touring show was a step-out role from the chorus in a mainstage production.
Perhaps hastened by the strictures of the pandemic, that is no longer the case, and this double-bill, which goes on to play the summer season of London’s Opera Holland Park after its Glasgow and Edinburgh dates, gives the current cohort of young singers an excellent opportunity to strut their stuff.
The pathway is clearest in the world premiere after the interval, because composer Toby Hession – who also conducts the whole evening – and librettist Emma Jenkins honed their partnership for those Opera Highlights tours. Their shorter pieces, Told By An Idiot and In Flagrante, were the best of an initiative to include new works, and the latter was very much a stepping stone to A Matter of Misconduct!
Sharing more than an exclamation mark with Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London!, the pair’s interest in creating contemporary comic opera is nonetheless a far from over-populated field, and A Matter of Misconduct! pulls no punches in getting its laughs. The explicit vocabulary in Jenkins’ text is rare on the opera stage, and in baritone Ross Cumming, as ambitious MP Roger Penistone, they have a singer whose performance skills are already well-established.
The scandal that threatens his Parliamentary progress involves his wife Cherry (mezzo Chloe Harris) and her own ambitions to be a wellness guru, and their “allies” in trying to bury it are press secretary Hugo Cheeseman (bass-baritone Edward Jowle), lawyer Sylvia Lawless (soprano Kiri Kaplan) and special advisor Sandy Hogg (tenor Jamie MacDougall). Filled with barbs at both Westminster and Holyrood (a motorhome predictably figures), the script is confident enough of its terrain to make a serious point at the end and Hession’s score is as assured, with particularly good, and challenging, arias for Kaplan and MacDougall and a memorable duet for Harris and Cumming.
It says a great deal for the new piece, directed by Laura Attridge, that it can follow a brilliant revival of Gilbert & Sullivan’s first hit, marking the work’s 150th anniversary. John Savournin’s Trial by Jury is set in a 1980s television studio and Jowle, as studio floor manager rather than court usher, sets the scene before a note of music is heard.
The directorial device works a treat, and the young cast have MacDougall as Edwin, the Defendant, and veteran G&S man Richard Suart as the Judge leading the way with the campest performances. Even they are outdone by the Bridesmaids, brilliantly choreographed by Kally Lloyd-Jones, fronting a chorus in fine voice (as is the smaller one in A Matter of Misconduct!).
Whether from 40 years ago, or just a few months ago, the cultural references in both shows are absolutely spot on, and the singing onstage and playing from the pit as precise. The fact that these shows, alongside The Merry Widow, are going to London in their entirety, orchestra, chorus and all, should be a matter of no small Scottish pride.
Keith Bruce
Production shot of A Matter of Misconduct! by Mhaela Bodlovic
Just about every Mafia movie caricature worms its way into Scottish Opera’s opening summer production – a 1950s-style ragtag of mobster boors, buffoons and nasal New York broads answerable to a Don who’s just as inept as them.
All the more surprising when the work in question is Franz Lehár’s 1905 high society operetta The Merry Widow. With iron conviction and an instinctive eye for theatrical gold, director John Savournin – replacing Parisian ballgowns, chandeliers and pretentious manners with pin stripes, severed horse heads and earthy “swim with the fishes” patois – has taken a huge risk with an old favourite and artfully brought it off.
The storyline is a gratifying fit, at the centre of which is wealthy widow Hanna, a pawn in the wheeze by those around her to purloin her wealth, a situation complicated by comic ineptitude and an inevitable love interest. Perfect for this update, given the preponderance of spoken dialogue, is the gritty new libretto rewrite by Savournin and his writing partner David Eaton. It goes full mobster vernacular. Offers made are definitely not to be refused.
Where the stage action moves with frenetic impatience, the visual experience is every bit as exhilarating. The set designs by takis present a vivid cocktail of glamour and glitz, with neat hints of kitsch. The Scottish Opera Chorus are a mesmerising tour de force, constantly on the move, singing with Broadway gusto. Savournin approached this production with a belief that operetta was the natural progenitor of MGM musicals. On this evidence, who would argue.
Certainly not this Scottish Opera cast, whose performances are wholeheartedly on message. Topping the bill, Paula Sides plays Hanna with glowing magnetism, an authentic Texan drawl and sensuous vocalism, matched by eventual lover Alex Otterburn’s deftly enigmatic Danilo. Baron Zeta is now Mafioso boss Don Zeta, portrayed with suitably wavering assertiveness by Henry Waddington. Rhian Lois cuts a cutesy presence as his scheming wife Valencienne, renamed Valentina. A frenzy of knockabout cameos add to the spectacle.
Equally smitten by the show-stopping razzmatazz is the Scottish Opera Orchestra, capturing the voluptuous cinematic sweep of Lehár’s score with unceasing charisma. Music director Stuart Stratford elicits their passions from the word go, honing the richest of colours – note the Mediterranean twang of the mandolin as the action switches to Sicily – and charting a musical ebb and flow that powerfully magnifies the narrative.
This production’s opening night had the entire Theatre Royal buzzing with unfettered laughter, an unmistakable measure of its success.
Ken Walton
[Image: Mihaela Bodlovic]
Glasgow performances continue till 17 May, with further performances in Inverness (22 & 24 May), Edinburgh (29 May – 7 June), and Aberdeen (12 & 14 June). Full details at www.scottishopera.org.uk
The new season unveiled by Scottish Opera marks a decade in post for Music Director Stuart Stratford, and it has been one of company stability and notable artistic successes. Before talking about what’s to come, he identified his own highlights of those ten years.
“I always feel there is still so much to do, but Puccini’s Il trittico was a highlight for the whole company. It was a major project for us. There are also the collaborations which produced Greek, Breaking the Waves and Ainadamar, which has gone to Detroit, Houston, the Met and Los Angeles but originated here.
“Then there are the community pieces, like Pagliacci in Paisley, Candide at Edington Street and Oedipus Rex at the Edinburgh Festival – those are the kind of projects we’re really interested in as a company.
“And there are the rare operas. It was great to have given the Scottish premiere of Daphne by Richard Strauss, and Scottish Opera should always be championing unusual pieces as well as the core repertoire.”
That said, the 2025/26 season, unveiled as the company opens a new production of The Merry Widow at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, has just the one show that really ticks the boxes for innovation and adventurousness. Like this year’s Edinburgh Festival programme and the coming season from the RSNO, it has all the hallmarks of being signed off in straitened times.
The exception is the world premiere of The Great Wave, a new work by Japanese composer Dai Fujikura and Scots librettist Harry Ross, best known in his native land previously as the producer of the award-winning presence of the British Army at the Edinburgh Fringe – “a foil to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo” as The List magazine put it.
Fujikura’s previous successes include an operatic version of the Stanislaw Lem novel Solaris, and The Dream of Armageddon, based on an H G Wells short story, both of which involved Ross.
The new piece is the story of Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai and his daughter, Oi, and is being co-produced with KAJIMOTO, who will present the work in Kyoto and Tokyo.
Says Stratford, who will conduct: “Fujikura’s music is quite eclectic, avant garde meets Japanese mimimalism, and in this piece there is a big role for the shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, which gives it a really interesting sound-world.”
The other main house shows in the season are revivals: the Barbe and Doucet La boheme from 2017, which the pair will return to direct, with Hye-Youn Lee also returning as Mimi, and Sir Thomas Allen’s The Marriage of Figaro, back for another run but sung in English this time.
As with The Barber of Seville, Stratford believes the production will be reinvigorated by the change.
“There we saw a development in the performances and a renewed connection with audiences in the refreshed version. Boheme, on the other hand, I think loses some of its attraction if it’s not in Italian.”
Earlier next Spring, the Theatre Royal will also see a Saturday afternoon concert performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, repeated during the following week at Edinburgh Usher Hall, and Stratford says that is a taster of a new commitment.
“It was 2013 when we did The Flying Dutchman, so it is high time we tackled some Wagner, especially as the orchestra is playing as well as it has ever played – so you’ll see more in the coming years.”
As has become its custom in the past decade, the company starts its new season in Haddington at the Lammermuir Festival. This year that is a double bill, pairing comedies of infidelity, Walton’s The Bear and Ravel’s l’heure espangnole, which will be part of the festival’s commemoration of 150 years since the birth of the French composer. As has happened only more recently, the operas will also be seen later in both Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Although there is no staged community production this year, that work goes on, in primary schools as part of the Glasgow 850 celebrations, with the building of a children’s chorus that will feature in main stage shows, and with the establishment of an Edinburgh branch of the adult community chorus, mirroring the Glasgow one and following on from the work for the EIF Oedipus Rex.
Full details of the new season can be found at scottishopera.org.uk
Funding austerity has shaped this year’s International Festival, writes Keith Bruce
Politically-astute EIF director Nicola Benedetti prefaced the media briefing revealing her third Festival programme with an enthusiastic acknowledgement of the recent funding announcement from Creative Scotland.
It increased support for an expanded list of client organisations and assured many more arts companies of multi-year funding. Far and away the largest sum goes to the Festival itself, £3.25m in the coming financial year, rising to £4.25m in 2027/28, and Benedetti described the news that came at the end of January as “pivotal” for the whole sector in Scotland.
It did, however, come too late for this year’s Festival, which she would later describe as “more compact” than those of her first two years, and which clearly took shape in a restricted financial climate.
The black cover of the 2025 programme has a cut-out in it that reveals the theme the director has given to this year, The Truth We Seek, printed on page three inside. That gap at the front is, unfortunately, mirrored by the holes in the grid at the back of the brochure that everyone uses to plan their Festival-going.
A new play starring Brian Cox, Make It Happen, is the first event, at the Festival Theatre, but after its run nothing happens there for nearly a week, until Scottish Ballet unveils its new Mary, Queen of Scots for four performances, which is followed by another four days with no Festival programming in the theatre.
The smaller Lyceum is also “dark”, in terms of International Festival shows, for over a week of the EIF’s three. Its shows include three performances in this year’s much-reduced opera programme, of Huang Ruo’s Book of Mountains and Seas, directed by the Olivier Award-winning designer of My Neighbour Totoro, Basil Twist. The other staged opera, three performances of an Australian staging of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, is the only use the Festival makes of Edinburgh Playhouse this year.
That makes for a lot of gaps on the fold-out venue grid in the brochure. The only venues without big empty spaces in their calendar are the Usher and Queen’s Halls and the EIF’s Hub home.
There are two more operas in concert at the Usher Hall, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev continuing their journey through Mozart with La clemenza di Tito and a residency by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Antonio Pappano including Puccini’s Suor Angelica.
The EIF’s new Head of Music, Nicolas Zekulin, told Vox Carnyx that the event’s commitment to presenting opera hadn’t changed but the year-to-year reality always showed fluctuations.
“The opera offer this year fits in to what had been an ebb and flow. Last year’s was significant and substantial but the year before was less, so there has been a natural ebb and flow and I think this year fits into that pattern.
“Opera has multiple facets and this year has two unconventional productions, and sometimes those are the ones you want to show. The production in the Playhouse is about opening up that repertoire in a new way.”
It is the European premiere of the Opera Queensland production, made with the acrobatic troupe Circa, whose reputation was built at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This incarnation will have the SCO in the pit, Iestyn Davies as Orpheus and the Chorus of Scottish Opera, prepared by Susannah Wapshott.
In fact, as Benedetti noted in her presentation to the press, the 2025 Festival features all five of Scotland’s directly-funded national companies: the National Theatre of Scotland is Dundee Rep’s producing partner for playwright James Graham’s new Make it Happen and the RSNO performs both the Opening Concert of John Tavener’s epic The Veil of the Temple and the Closing Concert of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, where Scots mezzo Karen Cargill is one of the soloists.
Both of those also feature the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, which celebrates its 60th anniversary with a total of five concerts. It joins the LSO and Pappano for two concerts, performing in Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony and the Puccini opera, and the BBC SSO under Karina Canellakis for Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.
With the National Youth Choir of Scotland’s now-regular contribution to the Festival being that Opening Concert and one with the London Philharmonic under Edward Gardner and the RSNO Youth Chorus also involved in Suor Angelica, there is no shortage of local talent in this year’s line-up – perhaps a case of thrift, rather than charity, beginning at home.
Zekulin said that he was under no illusions about the realities of the Festival’s position when he took up his post.
“I was aware of the constraints from the start, and the need to be creative within a budget. Working within certain parameters is something we all do all the time, but this is an international festival so I still get to do amazing stuff – I can’t complain!
“What’s a gift for us with the recent funding announcement is that 2027 is the 80th anniversary of the Festival. That’s a signature moment and works out well for us. We can look at ’26 and ’27 in parallel and think about what that anniversary means.”
Other musical visitors this year include residencies by the youth orchestra from New York’s Carnegie Hall, NYO2, and Poland’s NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra from Wroclaw, with whom Benedetti will appear as violin soloist. There are also concerts by the orchestra of the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, Ivan Fischer’s Budapest Festival Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Monteverdi Choir with the English Baroque Soloists and the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon.
The Queen’s Hall programme kicks off with the intriguing combination of percussionist Colin Currie and The King’s Singers and includes an equally promising programme from mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, as well as more familiar names including baritone Florian Boesch, Benedetti’s former trio partners Leonard Elschenbroich and Alexei Grynuk, the Dunedin Consort and the Belcea Quartet.
Public booking for EIF 2025 opens at noon on March 27 eif.co.uk
Picture of Nicola Benedetti in the Usher Hall by Ryan Buchanan; Orpheus & Eurydice by West Beach Studio
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.
