Music
An Evening with Donald Maxwell
Perth Theatre
Keith Bruce
four stars
IN what he insisted was his first final farewell performance, operatic baritone Donald Maxwell gave Nigel Kennedy a kick up the bum in the opening bars. While the mighty BBC was struggling to draw a fraction of a Rewind-sized audience to the grounds of Scone Palace for the Aston Villa-supporting fiddler and the BBC SSO, as part of its Biggest Weekend, Maxwell had attracted a full house to the refurbished Perth Theatre for a communal meander down memory lane, and he wasn’t shy about pointing this out.
There was also a constant vein of self-deprecation in the Maxwell monologue – “If you have come to hear Schumann’s Dichterliebe, you are going to be disappointed, but not half as disappointed as you’d be if I sang Schumann’s Dichterliebe” – but the evening was nonetheless all about the Donald, at least when it wasn’t all about Perth.
One of Scotland most successful musical exports, with a huge career as a performer, teacher and festival director behind him and celebrating his 70th birthday at the end of this year, Maxwell did not dwell on those successes much, with only the briefest mention of his time at Buxton, for example. In what was a site-specific performance in the most literal sense of the expression, the singer focused on his beginnings and the transition from being a Geography teacher at Perth Academy – with profuse apologies to anyone in the audience he had taught – to a professional singing career. It wasn’t absolutely necessary to have intimate knowledge of the characters who shaped the local area’s musical life in the second half of the twentieth century, but it certainly helped.
Reminiscence apart, there was also plenty of music, beginning with his theme tune On the Road to Mandalay and taking in Flanders and Swann, Gilbert and Sullivan (with community singing), and guest turns from pianist Scott Mitchell, Maxwell’s “Music Box” partner and fellow educator Linda Ormiston, and Perth’s latest singing star, soprano Rowan Hellier, soon to be seen again with the Dunedin Consort.
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