OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 12 February 2013, and touring

A BILLBOARD on the stage, amid all the other jumble of a rummage through history, was a reminder that Scottish Opera is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary.

THAT billboard was to promote two operas in the King’s Theatre Glasgow, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande during the week from 5th to 9th June 1962, and with those performances the cherished dream of Alexander Gibson was realised.

Opera Highlights 2013 – Nicky Spence, Eleanor Dennis, Katie Grosset and Duncan Rock (photo Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)

Some might argue that Scottish Opera is in fact celebrating its fifty-first anniversary as nearly everything had been in place to present three performances each of Don Pasquale by Donizetti (with Ian Wallace in the title role) and a double bill of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale and Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle in June 1961. What had not been in place was a grant from the then Scottish Committee of the Arts Council of £1713; a request that was turned down on the grounds that the application had arrived too late to be included in the Council’s annual financial budget. Such things could never happen today. Could they?

One thing that Alexander Gibson did not allow Scottish Opera to become was a Glasgow-centric organisation. The intention was always for the company to tour around the Scottish centres, first in 1963 to Edinburgh, then in 1964 to Aberdeen and later to Perth. Scaled down productions were conceived to go into smaller venues, known affectionately as SOOT (Scottish Opera on Tour) and SOFA (Scottish Opera for All), and then there was Essential Scottish Opera, which morphed into the annual Opera Highlights – four young singers, a piano and a basket of props touring here, there and everywhere from Bathgate to Bowmore, from Barra to Benbecula, from Banchory to Birnam and many points in between.

One of these points in between was Inverness, where a packed OneTouch Theatre enjoyed this nostalgic journey of reminiscences and arias from operas in the company’s repertoire over the past half century in a programme put together by Scottish Opera’s Head of Music, Derek Clark with script and direction from Adrian Osmond.

This year’s cast was, for a change, completely Celtic. Making her Scottish Opera debut was soprano Eleanor Dennis, born in Aberdeenshire but trained in London and returning home for this tour. Hers is most certainly a voice to listen out for in the future. In the mezzo role was Edinburgh’s Katie Grosset, a Scottish Opera Emerging Artist, seen recently in these parts as Flora and Annina in the touring production of La Traviata, and returning to Eden Court in May as Edith in The Pirates of Penzance.

The well-kent face in the cast was Doonhamer Nicky Spence, the tenor who was recently seen as Tamino in The Magic Flute and will be The Steersman this spring in Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Sadly his navigational skills will see him cruising along only the M8 and not up the A9. Making up the quartet of singers and a most welcome visitor from Wales was baritone Gary Griffiths, whose voice fully justifies his choice as the Wales representative in this year’s BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition.

In the pit, well, tucked behind a curtain and effectively impersonating an orchestra, was pianist Claire Haslin who must be one of the busiest musicians in Scotland – staff repetiteur for Scottish Opera, teacher at the Conservatoire, Glasgow University and Douglas Academy, accompanist with her husband, baritone Phil Gault, and mother.

As is always the case for Opera Highlights, the programme was a mix of well-known favourites and forgotten gems, running to twenty-one pieces, plus an encore. The first half opened and closed with drinking songs involving the full ensemble, from Verdi’s La Traviata to Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, book-ending Mozart, Britten, Tchaikovsky, von Weber, Bizet, Puccini, more Verdi, Smetana and Handel. If a highlight has to be chosen it would be Eleanor Dennis as The Governess in Britten’s The Turn of The Screw; or maybe Nicky Spence languishing in prison as Smetana’s Dalibor; or even the full quartet sailing “Over the bright blue waters” from Oberon by von Weber.

Neither well-known nor forgotten, the duet that opened the second half was a brand new piece, written for the tour, by Scottish Opera’s Composer in Residence, Gareth Williams. Eleanor Dennis and Nicky Spence are sitting at adjacent but single tables slowing forging a relationship in a somewhat Sondheimesque way. Delightfully sung and discretely acted, “Hand” was certainly a contender for Highlight of the Evening.

There followed pieces from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, then a spectacular “Oh pale blue dawn” from The Golden Cockerel by Rimsky-Korsakov, with Eleanor Dennis draped in gold with a lengthy train, more peacock than cockerel. Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the two couples from The Gondoliers by G&S gave way to a powerful if gruesome delivery by Gary Griffiths of “The Executioner’s Song” from Inez de Castro by James MacMillan.

It has to be asked whether practice made perfect for Katie Grosset in her delivery of “The Typsy Waltz” from La Perichole by Offenbach, especially looking back to her role as Frosch the jailer in the drinking song from Die Fledermaus. Luckily the Props Department back at Scottish Opera’s Production Centre in Glasgow maintains a generous supply of empties, courtesy of Moët et Chandon.

There was time for just two more excerpts, both from the period when John Mauceri was Music Director of Scottish Opera, having succeeded Sir Alexander Gibson in 1987. There was the emotive “Lonely House” from Street Scene by Kurt Weill – a final solo spot for Nicky Spence – and then a look forward to the next fifty years with an ensemble “Make our garden grow” from Candide by Leonard Bernstein, one of Scottish Opera’s greatest achievements as even the composer considered this production as the definitive version of his work.

This retrospective was about more than just the music of fifty years; the links provided anecdotes and stories of what has gone on behind the scenes, and the encore provided Eleanor Dennis with the opportunity to parade in a succession of costumes as well as sounding a caveat about the precariousness of the profession – Noël Coward’s “Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington!” Derek Clark, how do you follow that? What are you going to cram into the minibus for next year’s Opera Highlights?

© James Munro, 2013

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