Music
L’Amico Fritz
Theatre Royal, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
four stars
AN inventive director could have great fun reviving Pietro Mascagni’s rarely-heard follow-up to Cavalleria rusticana. It would lend itself to a small-scale touring version like Scottish Opera’s current touring Elixir of Love, although the compromises that would involve in the music – the main reason for tackling it all – might be too much.
There is something of Pygmalion about the story, although our friend Fritz Kobus is slower on the uptake than Higgins. “Shy” farmer’s daughter Suzel fails to get much reaction at all to her suggestive offer of her ripening cherries, however sumptuous the score’s most famous duet, and match-making clergyman Rabbi David (Stephen Gadd) has to explicitly suggest the pair get to know one another in the Biblical sense to maintain her enthusiasm. Is it too fanciful to suggest that Mascagni and his librettist Nicola Daspuro were having a joke at the expense of frigid northerners in their use of this little domestic drama from Alsace?
In this reading, the seemingly superfluous trouser role of gypsy fiddler Beppe (Hannah Hipp, Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, violin by) is there to supply the Song of the South element as the voice of Love, which Fritz (Peter Auty, Don Jose and Rudolfo in recent productions) seems determined to ignore in his confirmed bachelor way until the charms of Suzel (Natalya Romaniw, the rival princess in Rusalka) eventually become clear to him.
Mascagni’s music for this slight fare now seems rather grander than the plot deserves, but conductor Stuart Stratford and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera gave it a terrific full-blooded performance and the casting was pretty near perfect for the company’s first foray into concert performance of an entire work in its Sunday series.
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