What is in Kelvin's Head?

Don Giovanni – Scottish Opera – ***

27/05/2022

It is difficult to know why Scottish Opera have revived Thomas Allan’s production of Don Giovanni, which they first presented in 2013. It wasn’t exciting then and isn’t exciting now.

The curtain goes up to reveal a gauze that will remain in place to obscure the first scenes. Clouds can be seen scudding across it and eventually we get to glimpse Simon Higlett’s moody design.

The clouds had been going for quite a while though and were the perfect visual metaphor for the intonation problems that the strings were having during the overture. This lack of musical clarity continued throughout the first few scenes too. This was particularly noticeable during the initial trios. Herr Mozart doesn’t give much room for manoeuvre here – the mirroring of Leporello’s vocal part in the woodwind needs to be precise and crisp. In the event, it highlighted the fact that pit and stage were just a little out of kilter.

The trouble with obscuring the audience’s view is that the audience must then struggle to work out what it can see. A red light outside a building was much later revealed to be a votive candle sitting in front of a religious statue. Through the gauze though, it just looked like a red light, leading to the surprising possibility that the Commendatore was running a brothel. And why not, after all? If the whole production can be shifted to Venice for no apparent reason, why shouldn’t we begin outside a house of ill repute?

Vocally, the most interesting voices on the stage were the women. Hye-Youn Lee’s Donna Anna was clear and true, Kitty Whately’s Donna Elvira was sensational and Lea Shaw’s Zerlina was gorgeously sweet and pure. As one of Scottish Opera’s Emerging Artists she more than held her own on the stage.

The essence of Don Giovanni is surely that delicious experience of falling in love with a man one knows to be trouble. Roland Wood never quite took us to that place. Why should we love him? Why should we hate him? Like much else in the production, this wasn’t entirely clear.

The audience’s tentative ripple of applause which followed Zachary Altman’s catalogue aria was perfectly judged. However, everyone knows this should be a showstopper.

The set changes remain noisy and clunky but there’s an attempt to cover up the noise with some thunder. The set is noisier than the thunder though and in the first half we get lightning without thunder and in the second, thunder without lightning -the perfect metaphor for the show.

Oddly, a couple of non-singing nuns with no faces keep turning up. They look marvellous and their headgear seems to suggest that they are Catherine Labouré sisters. What they were up to in Venice though is another puzzle.

Interestingly, Scottish Opera announced next year’s season on the same day as this performance and rather oddly proclaimed that this, the final main stage production of this year is also being regarded as the first production of next year’s season. It is almost as though the marketing department had a meeting to try to work out how to cover up how rare Scottish Opera’s main stage shows are becoming, particularly for those outside the Central Belt.

Things have moved on quite a lot since this production was first staged.

The #metoo movement is acknowledged in the programme but this must demand fresh reappraisals of the Don’s relationship with women on the stage.

The pandemic itself has taken such a toll on the performing arts that it is a genuine joy for people to be back in the theatre encountering full stage opera performances. However, just one of the shadows of the pandemic for Scottish Opera is that its audience and its potential audience has had a very great many opportunities over the last couple of years to encounter genuinely exciting opera productions from all over the world in digital form.

Some things work in this production. The moody lighting, the fabulous hats, the glorious frocks and the most beautiful music in the world are all there.

But something else isn’t.

Rating:

This review was first published by the award winning Scene Alba magazine.

2022, Don Giovanni, Opera Reviews, Scottish Opera

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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