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SEEN AND HEARD
UK
OPERA
REVIEW
Orlando - Tim Mead
Angelica - Sally Silver
Medoro - Andrew Radley
Dorinda - Claire Booth
Zoroastro - Andreas Wolf
Orchestra of Scottish Opera
Paul Goodwin (conductor)
Production:
Harry Fehr (director)
Yannis Thavoris (designer)
Anna Watson (lighting)
The modern onward march of
Handel's operas, so notable south of the border, has been rather
more troubled in Scotland. The most recent features have included a
poorly received Scottish Opera Semele and
an EIF Admeto that
sounded good but looked awful. The trouble comes when producers try
to take works that are at heart mythical and fantastical and
interpret them for contemporary audiences: do you trust the original
setting and go for magic and monsters, or do you seek a solution
that grounds it more in our flesh and blood modern world?
Happily, Scottish Opera seem
largely to have got it right this time around. Harry Fehr's
production contains barely a hint of the work's fantastical origins.
Instead the work is set in a London military hospital in 1940.
Orlando is an RAF pilot caught between his duty to fight and his
love for the American socialite Angelica. She, however, loves
another soldier, Medoro. Both are tended by the nurse, Dorinda, and
the psychiatrist Zoroastro. Hence in the opening scene Zoroastro
reads Orlando's fate not in the stars but in the chart of an MRI
scan, and the images he conjures up to focus him on his duty are not
of gods and monsters but of Edward and Mrs Simpson visiting Hitler,
the ultimate dereliction of duty. Orlando's madness sets in as the
blitz begins and he is cured not by magic but by electrotherapy. For
me the concept worked very well: nothing expressly got in the way,
save a few unaltered aspects of the English translation that got
through the net - I doubt, for example, that many in 1940s London
had much need to "saddle their trusty steed". The set revolved
between rooms to aid the many changes of scene and, as with Fehr's Secret
Marriage of
2008, he kept a secret room for the final act to act as Orlando's
padded cell. There are enough hints of the hospital garden to serve
the work's pastoral side and subtle video projections give us
windows into the characters' psyches without becoming obtrusive. The
dramatic power of the work is, if anything, increased by the
sensitivity of the updating, though the high number of (presumably
unintentional) laughs could have been looked at by the production
team.
Musically the evening was strong
too. Heading the cast in the title role was Tim Mead, the best thing
about the EIF's Admeto in
2009. The voice seems more mature now, though perhaps less beautiful
and just a little hollow. Still, the icy quality lent itself well to
the depiction of madness and he easily trumped Andrew Radley's pale
Medoro, making you wonder why the ladies don't fall for him instead.
Claire Booth's Dorinda was charming, with just a hint of the Carry
On Nurse about her,
especially beautiful in her Nightingale aria at the start of Act 2.
The finest turn of the evening, however, was Sally Silver's
Angelica, her fulsome, rich voice soaring above the stave and
providing just the right amount of noble colour to a character who
isn't exactly sympathetic. Andreas Wolf sang Zoroastro with
impeccable English and rich tone but not quite enough power to make
himself easily heard. Handel specialist Paul Goodwin presided over a
much slimmed down band in the pit, producing an intelligently
characteristic 18th Century
sound. Handel's score for this opera is fairly uniform, so the
colour added by extra obbligato,
say horns and recorders for certain arias, was most welcome, nowhere
more so than during the aria when Orlando is soothed to sleep in the
third act to the accompaniment of two viole d'amore.
In an opera season that is not
exactly packed with box office winners it was good to see the
Edinburgh Festival Theatre so well filled. Scottish Opera passed the
challenge of making this work speak to us today and to appeal to a
wide audience. If anything, however, their next challenge will be
even greater when they mount Strauss's Intermezzo at
the end of this month. Watch this space...
Simon Thompson