Phipps Hall, Beauly, 2 February 2008

Essential Scottish Opera (photo - Mark Hamilton)

ESSENTIAL Scottish Opera is a tried and tested formula that sets out every year to take opera to the smaller communities throughout Scotland. Four singers and a piano, with props rather than costumes, perform a selection of known and unknown excerpts from opera and musical theatre. The concept is the same for every tour, so how can it remain fresh and appealing year after year?

One way is to bring in a fresh choice of songs each year, and Scottish Opera’s Head of Music, Derek Clark, has an encyclopaedic range to delve into and select twenty arias that has the audience saying either “I know that!” or “That’s a new one on me.” This year he even came up with a composer that was new to me, Josef Poniatovski.

A little bit of digging, and it turns out he was the great-nephew of the last King of Poland, and was in the service of Napoleon III of France who he followed into exile at Chislehurst in Kent, where he died in 1873. Whether he shared the magnificent Palladian mansion Napoleon built is unknown. At least the building is still there and in good use as the spectacular and luxurious clubhouse for Chislehurst Golf Club. But I digress.

Essential Scottish Opera changes every year by introducing four new singers, and over the years I have never been disappointed in their choice. All the same, perhaps this year the tour should have been known as Essential Aussie Opera, as three of the artists had followed the well trodden path of Dame Joan Sutherland to develop their careers in the UK.

The fourth offers a distinctly British CV, but a distinctly Scandinavian name. What was especially fresh about this year’s cast is that all four could act, as well as sing beautifully. I recall the company’s visit a few years ago when the soprano, Claire Wild, stood out as she acted her songs, whilst the other three just sang them. It showed, and Claire went on to sing Gretel in Hansel and Gretel for Scottish Opera, the part of The Cricket was written for her at Almeida Opera, and then she joined English National Opera at the Coliseum in London.

And a third source of freshness, and I use that word advisedly, is in the way that director Martin Lloyd-Evans has introduced a broad element of S. E. X. Much of the programme originated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but if these excerpts had been performed then as they were now, there would have been much popping of monocles, twirling of moustaches and calling for smelling salts! Of that, more later.

What does stay the same as the years go by is the quality of the production and the energy and stamina of pianist Ian Shaw. He keeps everything galloping along, as he has done since the last century.

The show opened with the famous drinking song from La Traviata by Verdi, billed as a quartet, but where was the fourth member of the cast? All was revealed when tenor Blake Fischer, as Alfredo Germont, burst in from the back of the hall in full voice, stripped off his outer clothes and took to the stage with bottle and glasses in hand. It was the overture to get everyone in the right mood as the party started to swing, to the extent that Alfredo and Violetta remained in a very passionate embrace as they purported to be a tree for the second number, ‘Ombra mai fù’ from Handel’s Xerxes, sweetly sung by mezzo Catriona Barr.

Then it was a couple of Mozart numbers. The trio, ‘Pria di partir, o Dio!’ from Idomeneo, and the flirting ‘Là ci darem la mano’ from Don Giovanni sung in celebrity style with soprano Amanda Forbes as Zerlina proving that she is ready to lead the way as the non-Aussie Anders Östberg as Giovanni tried to seduce her on the morning of her wedding to Masetto.

And so it continued, as Carmen and Don Jose sang their love duet, as Gilda sang of her love for the disguised Duke in Rigoletto, as Belcore dreams of winning the love of Adina through the bottle and his body in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, to the love between Poppea and Nero, sung by the two female roles, from The Coronation of Poppea by Monteverdi.

There was a brief visit to the emotions of love, rather than the physical, as Blake Fischer, as Lensky, sang of his love for Olga as he prepares to meet his former friend Eugene Onegin in a duel. Normal service was resumed for the finale to the first half with the Kissing Trio from Smetana’s The Two Widows, involving an inevitable three-in-a-bed romp!

A brief walk outside to lower the temperature was an essential, followed by a cup of tea and shortbread kindly supplied by Friends of Scottish Opera. Then it was time for the contribution of Prince Joseph Michael Xavier Francis John Poniatovski, in the shape of the ‘Audition Duet’ from his one-act burlesque Through The Wall, with Anders Östberg as the Impresario and Amanda Forbes as the Ingénue, both proving that the traditions of the Holywood casting couch were well established in nineteenth century Paris.

Offenbach offered Blake Fischer as Paris having to choose between three equally seductive goddesses, followed by the two men in the famous ‘Gendarmes’ Duet’, running them in with an accomplished opera buffa performance, complete with squeaky plastic truncheons.

All four singers were given the chance to shine with some lesser known songs, from Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon, Britten’s Billy Budd, Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore, Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate and Samuel Barber’s Vanessa. Then it was time for the finale, an unusual choice, ‘In praise of wine and love’ from Love at the Inn by Roger Quilter, beautifully sung by all four performers, and acted with the somewhat degenerate game of mixing up the room keys in a bowl, and then taking pot luck, with a twist!

It was interesting that the Beauly audience seemed to take to this little pantomime quite readily, and with not a few knowing titters! And then it got the loudest and longest applause of the evening. Maybe they know something I don’t? In Beauly!?

An encore was inevitable, and it was another of Derek Clark’s hidden gems, a nineteenth century anonymous German piece, ‘Sometimes in moonlit places’, after which a contented audience went out into the cold, checking whose keys they’d got!

© James Munro, 2008

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