Brian McMaster’s final Edinburgh International Festival took off with a fearsome noise last Sunday: the three peremptory chords that open Richard Strauss’s Elektra, signifying the murdered Agamemnon. In a little less than two weeks’ time, the curtain will come down on the McMaster era with the celebratory closing chorus of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
Those monster book ends reflect McMaster’s penchant for great German opera — his final fling also includes the first outstanding example of the genre, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, with the magisterial Claudio Abbado conducting in a production by his son, Daniele. McMaster is clearly pushing the boat out for opera in his final Highland fling, with a concert performance of Rossini’s Walter Scott-based seria La donna del lago, a new chamber opera by the young Scottish composer Stuart McCrae and two programmes from the Lyons Opera featuring high-profile directors. Peter Stein’s staging of Tchaikovksy’s Mazeppa opens on Tuesday at the Festival Theatre, where François Girard’s brilliant Kurt Weill double bill, The Lindbergh Flight and Seven Deadly Sins, has just been presented.
Elektra offered a showcase for the gifts of the young British conductor Edward Gardner, who needed to display his mettle in a big, complex score such as this before he takes up his appointment as music director of English National Opera next year. To date, most of Gardner’s operatic endeavours have been in the context of Glyndebourne’s tours, so inevitably smallish in scale. Working with a Royal Scottish National Orchestra on resplendent form, Gardner proved he was not merely a Mozart or Rossini specialist, but (almost) ready for the repertoire’s more formidable challenges. This was a predominantly lyrical Elektra, although Gardner turned up the decibels when necessary.
McMaster cast his Elektra with role debutants or singers new to their parts in this country. For the exhausting title role, he chose the American dramatic soprano Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet — she has nearly everything for the part, apart, perhaps, from an easy top C. She is a handsome woman with the kind of theatrical temperament that a concert performance inevitably inhibits — she swayed and stamped for her ecstatic dance of retribution, and dropped dead to dramatic effect, but you could sense her champing at the bit to throw herself around with wilder abandon. Her delivery of the text was chillingly incisive, and she relished the black humour of her exchanges with Klytemnestra.
That role was sung by a McMaster favourite, Leandra Overmann. Although rapturously applauded, Overmann made a grotesque comic caricature of Strauss’s great study of paranoia and neurosis, a cackling witch with booming chest notes. Silvana Dussmann’s womanly Chrysothemis afforded more pleasure, Ian Storey sang Aegisthus’s little scene with the voice of a heroic tenor and in the smaller parts could be heard the wonderful young voices of Matthew Rose (Orestes’ Tutor) and Liane Keegan (Second Maid).
The Lyons Weill programme offered a novelty in The Lindbergh Flight. The composer designated it a cantata, but the librettist thought of it as a Lehrstück, or didactic piece, though what he was trying to teach us, beyond the fact that Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic solo in a monoplane, remained obscure in Girard’s undoubtedly stylish staging. It was originally broadcast as a radio play with music — there is an important part for a speaking narrator — and remains static and untheatrical, though full of attractive music. In a striking set (by François Séguin) showing a map of the Atlantic, on which North America moved closer to Europe at the end, Girard made no special theatrical claims for a dated piece, but it looked impressive as Lindbergh (Charles Workman), sitting in a cockpit with a spinning propeller, made his trajectory across the stage.
Seven Deadly Sins is arguably Brecht and Weill’s joint masterpiece. A “sung ballet”, it is rarely given as such today, but Girard and his choreographer, Marie Choinard, gave the dance element equal status with the songs: the 16 dancers included no fewer than eight Anna IIs (the antiheroine Anna I’s dancing alter egos). Was that one for each sin and one for good luck? All sported tarty scarlet wigs and pole-dancer wear. We watched the sisters’ tour of the United States — Louisiana, Memphis, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco — on a silhouette map. The family sat behind the map, around a table that rose ever higher as Anna’s career and earnings progressed.
A searing indictment of capitalism or the commercialisation of sex? Well, possibly, but Sins works brilliantly as a morality drama — a sort of pithy female version of Don Giovanni or The Rake’s Progress — and I don’t think I have seen it done better than here, in a spectacular show with a thrilling central performance from the German soprano Gun-Brit Barkmin as the singing Anna.
At the Queen’s Hall, the excellent Scottish pianist Steven Osborne was a sellout for the first of two programmes in which he juxtaposes the preludes of two very different near contemporaries, Debussy and Rachmaninov. He is a fluent and musical player, but neither of those composers seems to suit his gifts as does Messiaen. Nonetheless, he made a strong impression in the watery grandeur of La Cathédrale engloutie and the brooding ruminations of Rachmaninov’s potboiler Prelude in C sharp minor.
The Welsh flautist Emily Beynon, now principal with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, devised a hugely enjoyable programme comprising the two great 20th-century sonatas for her instrument, by Poulenc and Prokofiev, Debussy’s brief and evocative solo Syrinx and, bringing the (not quite full) house down, a dazzling Carmen Fantasy by the little-known French flautist François Borne. Flute recitals may be a tough sell, but Beynon has the star quality to make a lot of friends for her instrument.
