Stravinsky’s morality tale can still teach us lessons today
Classical The Soldier’s Tale Edinburgh Academy Junior School ★★★★★
The Soldier’s Tale seems to have found a comfortable home in many ensembles’ concert programmes over the past 18 months. You can see why. With opera thin on the ground, this work about a violinist trading his instrument with the devil in return for untold riches offers a pint-sized music theatre experience using just seven instrumentalists and a couple of actors. Social distancing is a breeze. But the work’s origins in trauma and turmoil give it a particular resonance in our own pandemic times, too: stranded in Switzerland following the Russian Revolution, Stravinsky conceived it with writer CF Ramuz in the wake of the First World War, and it’s a world apart from the lavish decadence of his earlier music. A planned 1918 tour had to be cancelled because of the Spanish flu.
The Edinburgh International Festival’s performances formed the final panel in a triptych of concerts featuring violinist Nicola Benedetti. Truth be told, Benedetti was here very much as first among equals, joined by an ad-hoc ensemble drawn from Scottish and London orchestras. It felt, however, as though the septet had been performing together for years: their playing was perky and propulsive, their ensemble so sharp you might cut yourself on it, and their evident delight in cueing each other and swapping ideas back and forth only added to the sense of theatre. BBC SO principal Philip Cobb’s cornet was a joy to experience, and you could hear his years in brass bands from his rich, vibrato-laden tone. Benedetti came into her own, too, in the three dances with which the Soldier wakes a slumbering princess, each beautifully characterised: a raw, gutsy tango, fluttering waltz and brittle, clipped ragtime.
The more conventional theatre, however, took place out front, led by assured narration from Sir Thomas Allen, erstwhile star of opera stages, now a respected director, and here also responsible for the show’s modest staging: a table, a chair, and a bit of movement from Anthony Flaum as the homecoming Soldier and a redoubtable Siobhan Redmond as the Devil who tricks him. Flaum balanced bravado and vulnerability nicely as the naive recruit, though in truth he doesn’t get much to go on, even in the still witty 1950s English translation by Michael Flanders and Kitty Black. Redmond, on the other hand, began with a sense of gleeful mischievousness but revealed ever darker levels of menace as the show progressed.
There was, however, a problem with amplification. On a particularly dreich, drizzly Edinburgh afternoon, it wasn’t easy to discern the dialogue from row F, let alone from 20 rows further back. Thank goodness for the supertitles.
But this is a far from conventional year, of course, and audiences are happy to make allowances. Sound issues aside, this was a gloriously vibrant, thoroughly committed yet nicely knowing performance, and Allen’s simple staging provided just the level of theatricality that this unconventional work demands. You could scarcely hope for a more spirited, energetic musical backdrop, though even the instrumentalists’ playing grew more sober as the tale headed towards its concluding moral. Don’t try to get back what you once had, intoned Allen’s narrator, and be happy with what you have today. There was a lesson there in 1918, and there is a lesson for us today, too.