Opera Highlights

Eastwood Park Theatre, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

five stars

SCOTTISH Opera’s tours to small venues are, as music fans the length and breadth of the country know, bi-annual opportunities to see and hear top talents at the start of their careers. These days that means not only the four singers involved, but also the directorial team and a young composer.

That full range of artistic as well as vocal expression is what makes this latest show of the series such a spectacular success. Director Laura Attridge has sewn together Derek Clark’s diverse selection of vocal lollipops with some witty dialogue, in the setting (designed by Ana Ines Jabares-Pita) of a wedding reception.

We never meet the happy couple, Oscar and Hugo, but mezzo Katherine Aitken prefaces her Offenbach duet with soprano Katy Thomson with the wry observation, born of her character’s personal disappointment, that they have “both managed to find a man who deserves them.”

Playing both the guests and the staff at the function, the singers, completed by baritone Jerome Knox South African tenor Innocent Masuku, reward Attridge’s clever script and full use of every inch of the stage with probably the most naturalistic acting performances Opera Highlights has seen. Knox and Thomson shine from the start, in the title character’s supercilious aria from Act 1 of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, but Aitken and Masuka match them immediately with their duet from Rossini’s La Cenerentola.

There are some very fine solo turns – from the very mature-voiced Thomson in particular, on Handel, Massenet and Lehar – but it is the ensemble work that really stands out. Nowhere is that more the case than in this show’s new commission, In Flagrante, composed by music director (and company repetiteur and assistant conductor) Toby Hession to a libretto by Emma Jenkins, director of the recent semi-staged version of Strauss’s Daphne.

Here the hotel function suite becomes the morning after a night of debauchery at a political party conference, as three government ministers face the consequences of their behaviour becoming public. Aitken channels her best Malcolm Tucker, minus the expletives, as spin-doctor Rhona.

Complete with Brian Rix farce underwear and outrageous rhyming (“kerfuffle/reshuffle”), it is the first time the programme’s world premiere can be identified as the funniest part of what is a consistently funny show. That is as much a tribute to Hession’s skilful score as it is to the cast’s delivery of the splendid text.

In that piece and throughout the quartet appear to be having a ball, and this is one Highlights show that does not need to be run-in before it can be unreservedly recommended. For the company it will be more of an adventure getting to Lochinver Village Hall in two-and-a-half weeks’ time, but they were already on top form in leafy suburban East Ren.