A total (and often gripping) theatrical experience: Scottish Opera’s Ainadamar reviewed

Do you remember Osvaldo Golijov? Two decades ago he was classical music’s Next Big Thing: a credible postmodernist with a lush and listenable tonal flair, and an Argentinian with an interestingly complex European heritage in a millennium where everyone agreed – for a while, anyway – that the future was Latin American. Major labels recorded his music as soon as it was premièred; he was popular. Too popular for some – I remember a contemporary music promoter lamenting, with the demeanour of a housemaster who’s just found the head boy smoking behind the bins, that Golijov ‘hadn’t developed as we’d hoped’. Anyhow, Golijov was big, and then something stalled. Commissions failed to materialise, there were rumours of creative block, and the parade moved on.

So here we are in 2022, finally witnessing the ‘Scottish première and first staged UK production’ of Golijov’s 2003 opera Ainadamar. Note those qualifications: Ainadamar was snapped up for a UK première towards the peak of Goli-mania in 2008 (not in a theatre, but by the CBSO in Birmingham) and it hasn’t been seen here since. The impression left by that 2008 concert performance was of an essentially static work, a dramatic cantata with the emphasis on the cantata rather than the dramatic. If nothing else, this new production by Deborah Colker for Scottish Opera puts the record straight. The visual dimension adds immeasurably to the score’s effectiveness. Ainadamar belongs in the theatre.

But Colker goes further – conceiving an onstage world that makes sense of the dream-like flashbacks and narrative layers of David Henry Hwang’s libretto, and presenting it with a bravura that matches (some might say rescues) Golijov’s smoky, flamenco-infused music. The story, condensed into a slightly overlong 80 minutes, is the death of Federico Garcia Lorca, told in flashback by the actress Margarita Xirgu, star of Lorca’s Mariana Pineda. The designer Jon Bausor has created a circular curtain of hanging threads; a shifting, permeable barrier between fact and fiction, past and present, and with the aid of video projections (Tal Rosner) and moody lighting (Paul Keogan) it supplies cover for scene changes, as well as providing abstract imagery in its own right. The grief-stricken Margarita (Lauren Fagan) runs around the circle, rippling the threads with her hand. Blood-red ropes slide down from above, in a sinister inversion of the opera’s central image – the ‘fountain of tears’ outside Granada where Lorca is believed to have been murdered.

The two leads (only two really count for much, though Julieth Lozano was alert and sympathetic as Margarita’s student Nuria) took that space and filled it with hot-blooded life. Margarita effectively carries the show, and Fagan – fresh from playing the village tart in The Wreckers at Glyndebourne – breathes tearful fervour into every gesture and phrase, scraping a dark, bitter residue of pain from her low notes. She’s tremendous, her vocal performance clearly informed by the feral, soul-scouring cry of the flamenco singer Alfredo Tejada, playing the Falangist officer whose menacing broadcasts (projected like newsreel headlines) are the most chilling moments in the story. That folk idioms are not automatically equated with freedom or authenticity is one of the more rewarding aspects of Golijov’s score.

Against Margarita’s flaming conviction, Lorca himself (a trouser role, sung by Samantha Hankey) is a cooler customer, elegant in suits and neckties. Again, Hwang and Golijov’s decision to present Lorca as an artist driven by an inner voice (as against the politicised theatricality of the actress Margarita) is a fascinating piece of characterisation, and Hankey embodies the poet with easy grace. Her masculine saunter is matched by the measured passion of her singing, which gradually tightens into a cry of pain. There’s striking choreography without too much eye-flashing or castanet-snapping, and while your enjoyment of Golijov’s music (warmly played and tightly paced under the baton of Stuart Stratford) will depend upon your personal tolerance threshold for flamenco guitars and sultry trumpet solos, this production is about more than the music: it’s a total (and often gripping) theatrical experience. An opera, in other words. Golijov came on stage to take a bow. He looked thrilled.

In Manchester, Sir Mark Elder conducted Verdi’s Requiem and it was as formidable as you’d expect, with the low brass (complete with cimbasso – imagine a trombone pumped full of growth hormones, then wrapped around a lamp-post) flooding the bottom of the orchestra with velvety El Greco blackness while the Hallé Choir floated and glowed cherubically from above (they were amazingly nimble in Verdi’s massive choral fugues). Soaring through clouds of glory was the soprano Natalya Romaniw, singing as though she was in Don Carlos and quivering with passion on the final ‘Libera me’. Apparently this was her first Verdi Requiem and Elder persuaded her to sing it; in which case we have yet another reason to be grateful to Sir Mark.