Scottish Opera: The Verdi Collection
Usher Hall - 11/02/23
A passionate evening at the Usher Hall
Scottish Opera with their limited budget usually manage to do about 5 complete staged operas a year, but they have become very skilled at other operatic interventions, their small scale touring concerts, their semi-staged concert performances of rare operas, like their lesser known Puccini series, and tonight they gave us selected operatic scenes by the greatest of all opera composers, Verdi. Stuart Stratford, our conductor for the evening and Scottish Opera’s music director, introduced the programme and said they wished to create the drama as well as the music of Verdi and discovered in rehearsal that they didn’t need the elaborate staging or costumes of fully-staged operas because Verdi’s scenes were perfect dramas in themselves. This is a sentiment I would agree with, having seen some badly staged operas recently, ruined by directors wanting to make them “relevant and modern”. Give me a good concert performance any day over a ‘Regietheater’ production!
Fortunately, our singers at this concert are quite decent actors as well as good singers, and above all Verdi’s music has the drama in every note. We began with the overture to ‘La forza del destino’, great music made familiar more recently being used in the great French films ‘Jean de Florette’ and ‘Manon des Sources’. The Scottish Opera Orchestra did them proud and was a very sensitive accompaniment to all the scenes, not overpowering the singers despite their proximity on the stage. The overture was followed by a scene from Act 4 of ‘Otello’ with Eri Nakamura singing ‘The Willow Song’ and ‘Ave Maria’; she was ably supported by mezzo Katherine Aitken as Emilia. Sadly, Katherine was the only Scottish singer on stage and covering the minor parts. I know opera is an international art, but there are many good young Scottish singers like Beth Taylor active in European opera houses. I do think Scottish Opera could do more to promote Scottish singers; after all we do have one of the top Conservatoires in the world. Having said that, Eri Nakamura is a very good young Japanese soprano, who after her apprenticeship at Covent Garden is making her name internationally. She is strong in the dramatic range although not quite so good in the quieter moments of ‘The Willow Song’ or ‘Ave Maria’.
This was followed by three scenes from ‘Don Carlos’, which is Donald Macleod of Radio 3’s favourite opera and one of mine. This introduced the singer, who was for me the star of the evening, the South Korean bass Jihoon Kim, again a former Covent Garden Young Artist who is now becoming a star across the world. His voice is sensational, deep dark and powerful; it doesn’t seem possible that such power can come from such a slight frame. He was ably assisted by American baritone Lester Lynch and English tenor Peter Auty, but my favourite of the evening was his solo performance of ‘Ella giammai m’amo’ (she doesn’t love me). This was one of my father’s favourite arias. I remember taking him to the farewell concert of the great Bulgarian bass Boris Christoff, who was then 75 and didn’t sing this quite demanding aria in his concert but sang the first few lines for my father when we went to see him at the stage door! Kim is in my opinion fit to be compared to Christoff and I predict he will become a great star.
After some ballet music we got a scene from ‘Un ballo in maschera’ with Eri Nakamura in her most dramatic form, with able support from Peter Auty. After the interval we had Act 2 scene 1 from ‘La Traviata’ with the angst ridden sacrifice of Violetta after the plea by her lover’s father. I’m not sure Lester Lynch was quite as convincing in this scene as in some of his other arias. I have seen all the great baritones sing this at Covent Garden, and I can tell him he was better than Placido Domingo in this part pretending to be a baritone. We ended up with two scenes from ‘La forza’, whose overture opened the evening. Again this was well performed by our singers, although Peter Auty’s voice got a little stretched towards the top notes.
After warm applause from the very full Usher Hall, Stuart Stratford rewarded us with an encore, the ‘drinking song’ from Traviata with all our singers taking part. It was a lively end to a splendid evening of operatic lollipops. Let’s have more of these, Scottish Opera, and maybe with some Scottish singers!
