Festival Opera
Manon Lescaut
Usher Hall, Edinburgh
Keith Bruce
****
WITH the epic prospect of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung on the horizon, this penultimate opera performance of EIF 2019 was a perfect illustration of the strengths, and limitations, of concert performances that have become essential to the Festival.
Although there had been a wholesale change of cast around American soprano Sondra Radvanovsky before this Deutshce Oper Berlin version reached the hometown of the company’s music director, conductor Donald Runnicles, she had very fine support from Jorge de Leon as Des Grieux, Thomas Lehman as Lescaut and Carlos Chausson as Geronte in what was a truly international cast.
In a Festival that has been distinguished by them, here was another stonking soprano in the title role, whose stage presence was as essential an ingredient to the success of the evening as her magnificent, show-stopping singing. Even her change of frock at the interval was the single concession to staging in a basic front-of-the-stage rendition of the music, scores on stands for some of the arias.
As a very fine programme note by Roger Parker lucidly explained, Manon Lescaut makes best sense in the Puccini canon as an essential stepping-stone to the genius of La boheme, and staging its wild geographical leaps remains a challenge, but a concert performance is all about the music, and the ravishing Radvanovsky shared that with the German company’s excellent orchestra and chorus.
The singers were faultless, and immaculate, although their trooping out and in from the choir stalls in the numbers required for specific scenes was a distraction, and their placing might have been better realised. The orchestra was precisely a pit band placed onstage, so that you could see what they were up to and it had fine solo players in the winds, a sparkling horn section, and some luscious ensemble strings. Since his departure from the BBC SSO, we see too little of Runnicles in his homeland, and this was a reminder of just what a fine conductor he is.
Concert performances of big opera scores were a feature of his time at Glasgow’s City Halls, but nonetheless this Puccini would have seemed a strange choice back then. In the context of this year’s Festival it made perfect sense.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here