Festival Music

HMS Pinafore

Usher Hall

Keith Bruce

Four stars

Listening to one of the brass bands performing outdoors across Edinburgh as part of the International Festival’s Fanfare outreach project on a glorious Sunday afternoon was perhaps the perfect preparation for an early evening concert performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s early hit comic operetta. If ticket sales for its original run in 1878 were affected by a heat wave that kept Londoners out of the theatres, the weather was no deterrent to the capacity house in Edinburgh.

Tim Brooke-Taylor supplied the punning narration and a few period details – mostly of the wit of W S Gilbert – to link the songs, and Richard Egarr’s crisp approach to Sullivan’s score was rewarded by some fine playing and singing by the Orchestra of Scottish Opera and the chorus. In G&S the chorus are exactly that, commenting on the action, and often have some of the funniest lines even – especially – when they are repetitions, and the three dozen singers were as articulate as they were musical.

That could also be said for the front line, a cast of British singers perfectly matched to their roles, the size difference between Hilary Summers as Little Buttercup, in an appropriately-coloured dress, and Andrew Foster-Williams as Captain Corcoran adding to the humour. Her glorious dark alto was part of a lovely range of voices, with Elizabeth Watts supplying the soaring top notes as Josephine and Toby Spence a very playful, light-toned but powerful Ralph Rackstraw.

Gilbert’s satirical swipe at Whitehall with Sir John Porter, the desk-bound First Lord of the Admiralty, still rings as true today, as Brooke-Taylor observed, and John Mark Ainsley gave the character all the pomposity his epaulettes deserved.

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