Scottish Opera Young Company: Maud & Down in the Valley

Albert Halls, Stirling - 30/07/23 

Chris Gray, conductor

The Scottish Opera Young Company is a unique year-long skills-development programme for singers aged 17 to 21, accessed through annual audition, though successful participants may spend up to three years on the programme, typically one or two.  Working with operatic and theatrical professionals, two productions per year, in December and July, showcase the emergent talent.  I caught the last of four performances of this July’s production in Stirling’s Albert Halls on Sunday 30th, having had the opportunity to attend a talk with the company’s Artistic Director and conductor, Chris Gray, earlier that day at the Lesser Hall of the same venue. 

This year’s post-pandemic cohort of only 11 young people presented two chamber one-act operas: Henry McPherson’s ‘Maud’ (an SOYC commission from 2018) and Kurt Weill’s 1948 ‘Down in the Valley’.  Though separated in time and place, both works have at their heart an exploration of a fearful dichotomy: community as nurturing, supportive protector of life and group identity; versus community as suspicious, and ultimately violent, suppressor of difference and individuality.  In both, it is tragically the ugly side of community that triumphs.  By transporting the place of the action (medieval Herefordshire and 1930s backwoods America) to an isolated Hebridean community, and playing the operas without a break, Flora Emily Thomson’s direction made this thought-provoking link real, heightened and natural. 

The scoring of both operas was adapted to a two-piano reduction, with percussion (including vibraphone, anvil and a tubular bell in the McPherson), and a violin in the Weill.  Audience seating was parterre cabaret-style, with the set, a rocky woodland clearing, close to the audience and the action extending throughout the space.  Costumes evoked medieval animism and superstition in the McPherson and rural American isolation in the Weill.  Set and costumes were designed by Finlay McLay. 

In ‘Maud’, the eponymous young girl chances on a tiny glowing creature in the wood while out picking berries.  Believing it to be a fairy, she secretly takes it home, where it is discovered and revealed to be a dragon.  Her parents insist it must be killed.  She persuades them to let her do the deed, but she hides it and lets them believe it is dead.  When her deception is discovered, the wrath of the community descends on her and ‘the beast’.  In the rush she is crushed.  The community celebrates the death of ‘the beast’.  McPherson’s score is not merely music but a soundscape, with sung dialogue being often echoed by whispers appearing to come from the trees.  The music is very 21st-century, with an ever-present undercurrent of menace and violence.  It packs a theatrical punch. 

‘Down in the Valley’ owes much to American folk music, but the undercurrent of violence is equally unmistakable.  A Romeo-and-Juliet style narrative of forbidden love, the action opens with a religious leader berating the community for recent tragic events.  Cut to Brack Weaver, on the night before his execution, feeling forsaken by his love Jennie Parsons.  He escapes, makes his way to her house, where he discovers she has been forbidden to write to him and they reaffirm their love.  They reminisce about the events, cueing a flashback to their flirtatious encounter at a prayer meeting, their plans to attend a dance together, the disapproval of her mother who favours a drunken (but relatively wealthy) lout, Thomas Bouché, the fateful confrontation between Brack and Bouché at the dance, where the latter pulls a knife but in the ensuing tussle is killed himself.  Brack flees the scene and is pronounced a murderer, captured and sentenced to death.  Back to the present and Brack, secure in the knowledge of Jennie’s undying love, surrenders to the posse and is shot dead.  The music is rich in quoted folksong, including the eponym, and folkdance, so the contrast with the music of the fight and execution scenes renders them as punchy as that of the McPherson. 

This performance was my first encounter with the SOYC and I am truly blown away by the aura of professionalism, to say nothing of the intensity of well-nigh explosive creativity, that emanates from this young company.  Breathtakingly good.  Yet another example of excellence emanating from Scottish Opera.  Not to mention raw talent.  Wow.