THE single most important factor of this week’s programme announcement by Scottish Opera was its reaffirmation that the company will go into a new season with a musical director at the helm.
Italian Francesco Corti – whose appointment was announced a year ago, and who succeeds the long-departed Sir Richard Armstrong – takes up the reins properly during the 2008-9 season in charge of two main stage productions: Smetana’s The Two Widows a
nd Massenet’s rarely performed and harrowingly exquisite Manon.
But it is clear from Corti’s extended presence in Glasgow over the past few weeks that the conductor is intent on exerting a gradually increasing role in the overall shaping of plans for the company, even though he will continue to spit his time between Scottish Opera and his other opera post in the German town of Magdeburg.
“Manon is a big opera, with a long story and wonderful music. In all aspects it is a big, big landscape, but we can do it,” he says, with a great deal more confidence than we have been used to recently from those running our national opera company. Coming from an Italian – for whom opera courses through the blood – that’s an opinion that has to be taken seriously.
This will be Scottish Opera’s first ever production of Massenet’s opera, complete with full ballet scenes and a French production team headed up by director and choreographer, Renaud Doucet.
Those with long memories may recall that Smetana’s The Two Widows was staged in 1980 by the company. But this new production, jointly directed by Tobias Hoheisel and Imogen Kogge and featuring local star Jane Irwin among an impressive cast, opens as a bumper co-production with this year’s Edinburgh International Festival prior to moving over to Glasgow as part of the main autumn season. It is serious stuff.
“It’s a clever choice,” Corti believes, and a far more interesting example of Smetana’s operatic style than his better-known The Bartered Bride. “In The Two Widows he made a huge jump forward in writing for the orchestra, voices, and in respecting the dramaturgy,” Corti argues. “If The Bartered Bride is economy, then with The Two Widows Scottish Opera is flying business class.”
Not content just to talk about the productions he himself will command next season, Corti – even in his fractured English – has plenty to say about the entire Scottish Opera package, which may not be much increased on previous Spartan seasons, but has nonetheless been packaged in a way that makes the very most of the company’s modest resources.
Already in place before Corti had a say were two imaginative co-productions of Mozart’s Così fan tutte (with Opéra National du Rhin) and Verdi’s La Traviata with Welsh National Opera, which will be staged by Scottish Opera before entering the repertoire of WNO in Cardiff next year. The one brilliant, common element to these two productions is the dual presence of Scots director David McVicar, currently one of the most sought-after producers in the entire operatic world.
Against the weighty verismo of La Traviata, Corti spotted the ideal opportunity for Scottish Opera to stage another first – Scotland’s premiere production of Domenico Cimarosa’s The Secret Marriage. “It is the perfect complement to Verdi, and particularly interesting in relation to the Mozart,” he says. Cimarosa was an almost exact contemporary of Mozart and, in his day, infinitely more successful. The Secret Marriage remains the only opera ever to have been repeated in its three-hour entirety as an encore, at the request of Leopold II in 1792. Stylistically, says Corti, Mozart started where Cimarosa left off. “Così fan tutte could never have been what it was without Cimarosa’s influence.”
This new production is littered with Scottish Opera debuts, including Garry Walker’s first main-scale conducting appearance with the company and Harry Fehr’s as director.
If Corti isn’t physically involved in these, he is right at the forefront when it comes to an additional element to next season’s programme: the first reinstatement by Scottish Opera of unstaged concert performances. Once again the emphasis is on Italian repertoire – a one-off performance of Bellini’s final bel canto opera I Puritani – which Corti conducts at Glasgow’s City Halls in March next year.
While the new season may still represent a battle against financial constraints for Scottish Opera, you have to admire the canniness with which general director Alex Reedijk has packaged an apparently improved deal for opera lovers in Scotland – six significant operas compared with four in the current season. Imaginative collaborations, coupled with fruitful fund-raising initiatives, are beginning to open up opportunities for the company to fill in awkward gaps that have previously threatened its full-time status. Add to the above operas a 26-venue piano-accompanied tour of a new production of Lehar’s The Merry Widow, and a repeat of the successful Five-15 project – which brought together top composers and authors to create an evening of brand new mini-operas – and the future prognosis for Scottish Opera seems a lot less gloomy than in the recent past.
Assuming, of course, that the artistic standards are maintained more consistently than they have been over the past season. As I said last week in the wake of the company’s excellent Falstaff, there is still little room for manoeuvre where artistic success is concerned, given the relatively modest size of its operation. Can Francesco Corti bring a renewed sense of consistency to the company? The 2008-9 season is when we’ll find out.
• For full details of the 2008-9 season, visit
www.scottishopera.org.uk The full article contains 965 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
