Opera Highlights
Gaiety Theatre, Ayr Keith Bruce ***
SCOTTISH Opera’s four-singers-and-a-piano touring package has been more than a succession of well-known, and a few less familiar, arias and ensemble pieces for some years now, with young composition and directing talent sharing the platform with singers at the start of their careers.
Composer Sam Bordoli’s clever pastiche Overture, which references movie soundtracks as well as opera, gets this edition off to a promising start, and his To Music, which opens the second half, warrants a close listen as well, but their cleverness overshadows director Daisy Evans’s linking concept for the rest of the year evening, which is regrettably condescending in having the mostly dumb on-stage presence of actor Hannah Birkin “discover opera” through internet searches using Google and the Spotify platform.
Self-evidently someone sitting at a laptop wearing headphones is inherently untheatrical, so the vocal quartet are clad in garish suits – possibly derived from the multi-coloured logo of the search engine – to make up for that, and intone the computer’s functions in chorus-like children’s television presenters. As a device to sweep away misconceptions about the repertoire and range of music that is covered by the term “opera”, it lacks subtlety to say the least.
Fortunately, the singers are a very lively bunch, even if the costumes do them no favours, and head of music at Scottish Opera Derek Clark’s selection of work given to them to sing is as varied as always, although lacking a real undiscovered gem for the aficionados. All are making their company debuts, bar mezzo Sarah Champion, who was Dorabella in a touring Cosi and sings Handel particularly well in this programme, and the men, tenor Richard Pinkstone and baritone Dawid Kimberg, take the honours in the movement stakes. American soprano Sofia Troncoso is one of the current group of Scottish Opera Emerging Artists, so we shall certainly be hearing more from her.
Touring to October 27 and this week in Drumnadrochit on Tuesday, Wick on Thursday, and Forres, as part of the Findhorn Festival, on Sunday.