From the perfectly enunciated “Merde!” with which Jamie MacDougall’s cuckolded clockmaker Torquemada prefaces the overture to Ravel’s L’heure espagnole, this double-bill pairing the knockabout farce of infidelity with Walton’s lesser-known work is enormous fun.
MacDougall, a company stalwart, is the most experienced in a cast of current and recent Scottish Opera Emerging Artists, but the youth of the singers belies the depth of the characterisation they brought to Jacopo Spirei’s staging (adapted to fit the restrictions of St Mary’s church) that made musical and theatrical sense of the pairing.
The Orchestra of Scottish Opera, under the baton of Alexandra Cravero, had a ball with the ticking clocks, bells and jovial contrabassoon that detail Ravel’s colourful score. Walton’s Chekhov-derived The Bear, from half a century later, was a perfect partner, full of percussive speech rhythms to match the witty rhyming libretto.
Mezzo Lea Shaw, as Torquemada’s fickle wife Concepción, has the best of the time-related gags in the verbose text of the Ravel (sharply translated in Kenneth Chalmers’ surtitles) and the central aisle of St Mary’s was imaginatively used to add some sense of offstage action and time passing to a pacy production. The singers’ French diction was not always up to the standard of that first exclamation, but a larger problem was the addition of a little too much stage business, alongside pantomimic costumes and makeup, to what is already a ridiculous confection. Spirei, making his company debut, was perhaps guilty of overegging a rich pudding.
The Walton (based on the Chekhov short story about a widow obsessively mourning her faithless dead husband, before finding new love herself) also had no shortage of melodrama, in a nicely judged and well sung performance by the Australian Chloe Harris, who has the only well known song of the evening: I was a constant, faithful wife.
Good though both women were, the star of the evening was baritone Daniel Barrett, also making his Scottish Opera debut. He brought charm to the pivotal role of dim, innocent Ramiro, the muscular muleteer in the Ravel, and then really showed his chops in the bigger sing of the title role in The Bear.
• At Theatre Royal, Glasgow on 18 and 22 October and Festival theatre Edinburgh on 15 November.
