Scottish Opera, 03/07/2021

Verdi : Falstaff

Chorus of Falstaff

Orchestra of Scottish Opera

Stuart Stratford

It may be in a car park, with a roof covering but open walls, and uncomfortably hard folding chairs well spaced out, on a day where earlier heavy rain left many of us somewhat concerned that there would be more during the evening (there wasn't, thank goodness), but Scottish Opera's new Falstaff still feels like a real opera performance, in a real theatre, and it's a wondrous feeling.

This is not to downplay the achievement or the success of last autumn's La bohème, in the same venue, but there was a kind of cobbled-together feel to it, something like those "hey kids, let's put on a show in the barn" scenes you get in American musicals of the 30s or 40s, where the means are apparently minimal but the end result is improbably professional and good.  Falstaff, on the other hand, is unquestionably the real thing, with a full, proper design, and with a chorus, albeit stationed to either side of the stage and not participating in the action.  

As with the Bohème, the orchestra was playing inside the warehouse, and the sound piped into the car park, mixed at a sound board with the voices of the singers who were all miked, and at first, once again, I found it all a bit too loud, but this time (and this was the first night) it settled into more normal, and more variable levels, quite quickly.  Where the sound design lacked a little was in the stereophonic spacing; voices did not quite move from side to side or from front to back in the way the singers did, and sometimes balance between voices - particularly, say, when someone was leaving the set by the rear, while others came forward - wasn't always ideal.  The performance was given in English - I think that without the possibility of surtitling, the company prefers to give the audience a text it can understand - and as translations go, this one, by the writer Amanda Holden, was quite convincing, though not always completely intelligible.

Sir David McVicar was both director and designer for this occasion, and it's a good-looking production, as his usually tend to be.  The single set is the wooden frame of an Elizabethan inn/theatre, with angled steps to a balcony, and vast double doors at the back which open out onto (natural) greenery to excellent effect, the wood stained a warm crimson shade.  The costume is period, turn of the 17th Century, with Alice Ford particularly gorgeous in richly hued satins, and Dr. Caius's costume beautifully judged to be just slightly ridiculous, with mustard-coloured stockings, adorned with Pernod-green garter ribbons, and dandified red heels to his buckle shoes.  The supernatural beings for the last act were an eye-popping collection of grotesques, as if for a Carnival parade, including a caricature Queen Elizabeth I, and what I think might have been a Don Quixote with his horse Rocinante.  

McVicar's staging offered hints of comparisons between the two old knights, of Cervantes and Shakespeare, both relics of a time long gone, clinging to an old fantasy.  Falstaff's page, Robin, and the maid of the Garter Inn, in this production, both watch Falstaff as if he hung the moon, and attend him avidly, clearly entranced with him, and he does treat both with a small degree of gruff affection, which suggests that at heart, this Falstaff is not entirely the cowardly, thieving wastrel he can appear to be.  There's a vestige of courtly glamour still clinging to him, a suggestion that once upon a long time ago, there was a true knight in there, and a true nobleman, not just an accident of birth, an impression reinforced by the grandeur of Roland Wood's singing, full-voiced and imposing from the outset.  The days when I found Wood dry of timbre and somewhat stiff of presentation are now long gone, and his Falstaff was a vivid, hearty joy to hear.  

Elizabeth Llewellyn (Alice Ford) and Roland Wood (Sir John Falstaff)
Verdi : Falstaff, Act 2, Scottish Opera
(© James Glossop, July 2021)

He had a good foil in the Ford of Philip Rhodes, prickly and intense, whose Jealousy monologue was delivered without excess (and which I would have liked to hear in Italian, where the open vowels would perhaps have allowed his voice to ring out even more).  Elgan Llyr Thomas was a generally good Fenton, despite a slight tendency to bleat, which I never like to hear in a tenor, while Aled Hall was a particularly forceful Caius, and Jamie MacDougall has to be commended for singing Bardolph in a broad Lallands Scots, which made comprehension a bit difficult, but was certainly amusing. 

The quartet of ladies was particularly well cast, because each voice was extremely distinct, yet they blended beautifully together.  Even if you were looking elsewhere on the stage, you knew immediately which of the women was singing, because their vocal timbres were so clearly differentiated, from Louise Winter's fruity contralto Mistress Quickly to Elizabeth Llewellyn's lustrous Alice Ford, with Sioned Gwen Davies a warm, clear mezzo Meg Page between these two, and Gemma Summerfield a lighter, more silvery soprano as Nanetta.  At their first appearance, I thought they were more angry than amused at the identical letters, which worried me for a short while, because it would have blurred the lines between their intervention, and Ford's, who really doesn't have much a of a sense of humour about the whole affair until the very end.  However, by the end of the scene, they had relaxed enough that the sense of malice in their plotting finally had the right undercurrent of good humour, rather than spite.  

With the conductor in the warehouse to the side, and (from what I could see) only one screen at the rear of the 'auditorium' allowing the on-stage performers to see him, it was not surprising that the very tricky double ensemble of the end of Act 1 was not as precise as it should be.  All things considered, I'm actually surprised it went as well as it did, and it's surely testimony to a great deal of hard work on the part of all concerned.  The final fugue went better, though not perfectly, but it too is another delicate moment in the score that the absence of the conductor  standing right in front would certainly not help.  Not seeing the orchestra, I'm not sure if they used a reduced scoring or not, although looking at the members' list afterwards, winds and brass certainly look to be up to numbers, and there was nothing reduced about the sound they were making.  Conductor Stuart Stratford led his forces with wit and energy, and delivered a bright, vibrant interpretation rich in expression and emotion.

[Next : 6th July]