Opera

Mahler Players/Negus

Strathpeffer Pavilion

Keith Bruce

four stars

RENOWNED Wagner conductor Anthony Negus has conducted complete cycles of the composer’s epic Ring operas in Australia recently and will do so again at Longborough in the Cotswolds next summer, but he was making his Strathpeffer Pavilion debut on Sunday afternoon, after mentoring the founder and director of the Mahler Players, Tomas Leakey.

Leakey and his orchestra of Highland-based musicians followed last year’s concerts of Act 2 of Tristan und Isolde with Act 3 from Siegfried, the third part of the Ring, with four star soloists. They included a hastily-recruited Paul Carey Jones, as Wotan, the Wanderer, after Sir John Tomlinson became unwell in final rehearsals.

The veteran Lancashire bass was still present on Sunday afternoon, however, and introduced the performance, hailing the deputising singer as “a true Wagnerian hero”. In fact the titular hero was sung by Australian tenor Brad Cooper, who will revisit his performance as Apollo in Scottish Opera’s concert staging of Richard Strauss’s Daphne at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall next weekend.

Siegfried’s tetchy exchange with Wotan sits in the middle of Act 3 of his opera, which works well as a standalone concert, framed by duets between Wotan and Erda, the Earth goddess, (sung by mezzo Roxanna Madylus) and the climactic recognition of their love for one another by Siegfried and Brunnhilde (Scottish soprano Lee Bisset).

With only Paul Carey Jones reliant on a score, this became a very animated performance, for which a huge amount of the credit must go to Cooper. His portrayal of the change in Siegfried from fearless and arrogant to a young man made vulnerable by love was matched by a more subtle awakening from Bisset. He may have been keeping some of his vocal power in reserve on his first entrance, but was in full voice by the concert’s end, while Bissett sounded simply extraordinary in this space.

Review: RSNO / Sir James MacMillan, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, five stars

So too did the strings of the Mahler Players, whose playing was exemplary throughout, the precision knowledge of every bar of the music evident in the conductor’s guidance.

Just as Longborough, where both Bisset and Carey Jones will reprise these roles in 2024, is modelled on Wagner’s Bayreuth, so – it is said – Strathpeffer Pavilion owes an architectural debt to the Bavarian theatre. The composer’s music certainly sounded very at home in this attractive vaulted venue.