Opera

Opera Sparks 2018

Galvanizers, SWG3, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

IN what was a last hurrah for Scottish Opera’s Connect company both under the baton of conductor Chris Gray and under that name – it is rebranded Scottish Opera Young Company in the new season announced on Wednesday – a trio of new works of around 20 minutes each were premiered on Saturday in Glasgow’s newest repurposed post-industrial artspace.

Designer Karen Tennent produced a clever and attractive solution to the conundrum of giving director Olivia Fuchs settings for each of the very different works, but the opener, Maud by Henry McPherson, had the best of its slot in the programme as the audience entered through a forest of trees and chorus members to sit around its bark-floored woodland glade.

McPherson also had the benefit of the fullest hand of soloists from the young performers, with Erin Spence a compelling presence in the title role in a coming-of-age parable that nodded towards fairytale antecedents, and Ruby Donnelly and Ross Fettes making the most of the amusing dynamic between her parents in a libretto also written by the composer.

The nature of the performance area, and my proximity to the 18-piece orchestra (and especially the busy percussionists), meant that other words were lost, and that remained a problem, with some voices faring less well than others in the balance. The breadth of McPherson’s orchestration, on the other hand, was easily appreciated.

With composer Matthew Whiteside’s Little Black Lies, which followed, it was the range of the music that impressed, from the “Scary, scary, dark and scary” chorus to a contrasting, and sassily choreographed, “Footloose, fanciful and free” chorus later. His librettist, Helene Gron, had perhaps best appreciated the limitations of the venue, for this more contemporary dystopia that referenced the threats a violence faced by young people in the 21st century. Former Scottish Opera Emerging Artist Hazel McBain was their heroine, Sophie, her soprano voice cutting through in a way that was not always the case for mezzo Lise Christensen, who sang Anna, the older woman in Lewis Murphy’s Then to the Elements. His regular librettist Laura Attridge supplied the contemporary Frankenstein tale of a woman building the child she longs for on her lap top, with the company giving choral voice to her creation, from wordlessness to a version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

Christensen is a veteran of Scottish Opera’s Five:15 project, and therein perhaps lies a clue to what may become a regular new strand of the national company’s work with young singers and emerging composers. If so, this rich hour was a beginning of huge promise.