Music review: Opera Highlights, Gartmore Village Hall, Keith Bruce, three stars
Scottish Opera’s plan for its bi-annual trips across Scotland with four singers and a pianist has been to bundle together a selection of music within the framework of a fanciful invented narrative.
The concept works with various degrees of success, always redeemed by the talents of a young company who seize control of the show as the tour progresses. So by the time this one reaches Lochranza, Johnstone and Edinburgh’s Traverse at the end of the third week in November it should be a different beast.
The quartet has some work to do, however. Scottish Opera’s Head of Music Fiona MacSherry has complicated the formula by restricting the music to larger chunks of Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette, Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, and Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, with the entirety of Barber’s A Hand of Bridge thrown in for good measure. Director Emma Doherty's over-arching scenario is an office leaving-do, into which the characters from the source operas have been shoehorned. It is a bit of a stretch, which Kenneth MacLeod’s fussy design – full of terrific details though it is – further complicates.
There are some big voices on-stage, notably that of soprano Ceferina Penny in the Gounod, and baritone James Geidt works hard from the start to make the structure work, but there is too little room for the singers’ own personalities to emerge from the supposed romantic intrigues of these dislikeable workplace colleagues, and less knock-about humour than these shows usually thrive on.
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There are also far too few opera hits in the extended mixes, tenor Luvo Maranti’s enthusiastic delivery of Canio’s aria from Pagliacci eventually supplying something popularly recognisable to conclude the first half.
The charge to rescue the show will surely be led by mezzo Chloe Harris, whose time as a Scottish Opera Emerging Artist has marked out the Australian as a talent to watch. She already has fine solo turns with the Letter Scene from Massenet’s Werther and a trouser-role aria from Handel’s Alcina, and makes best comic use of her single repeated line in Menotti’s libretto for the Barber, before stealing the Strauss sequence with her “Chacun a son gout”.
The ensemble singing at the end of the show demonstrated that these four voices blend well, and the propulsive articulacy of pianist and music director Meghan Rhoades overcame the somewhat shrill sound of her electronic instrument. Together they can lift the atmosphere of this office party.
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