Music

Opera Highlights

Platform, Easterhouse, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

THERE is a sophistication about the recent incarnations of Scottish Opera's annual four-singers-and-a-piano outing to some of the country's far flung venues (including this time Gairloch, Durness, Strathmiglo and eventually Strontian on March 18) that belies its bland title. Emerging Artist scheme director Jim Manganello has responded to the musical programme devised by Derek Clark with a sort of meta-tour storyline that has the quartet stranded on a stationary train and teasing one another with a series of saucy and passionate solos and duets, as well as a handful of show-stopping quartets, making much use of flightcases, suitcase, and a multi-doored cabinet on wheels. The jokey tone of all this is set at the start, when tenor Elgan Llyr Thomas and baritone Adam Gilbert require Roisin Welsh and Emma Kerr to be La Boheme's Mimi and Musetta without actually singing a note.

Both have their chances later of course, the soprano especially on Gounod's Jewel Song from Faust and a second half aria from Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur, and mezzo Kerr (another Scottish Opera Emerging Artist) stretching from Handel to Rossini, Arthur Sullivan and Kurt Weill. Although Gilbert and Walsh seem to have the most dressing and undressing to cope with, there is perhaps a detectable bias in the programme to the singers on the company's young artist programme, and the first night clap-o-meter in Glasgow would suggest that it was personable and versatile tenor Thomas who won the laurels. Solo turns could not, however, eclipse the fine blend of the voices in an unaccompanied quartet by Albert Lortzing and a more familiar one from Weber's Oberon that closed part one. After the interval things take a rather more modern turn, with jazzy Ravel alongside the G&S, Roger Quilter and Kurt Weill, with Kerr's song from Lost in the Stars echoed in a quartet encore of The Saga of Jenny from Lady in the Dark.