These were diverse, and variously successful. Director Emma Jenkins, who also contributed the text to Hession’s composition, resisted any linking storyline, working instead with scenic devices by designer Janis Hart. The established formula of these programmes was intact here, Scottish Opera’s Head of Music Derek Clark mixing rarities with favourites and a brand new work (Told by an Idiot by Toby Hession) opening a second half which then tended towards lighter music nearer the end. The two men in the line-up, baritone Christopher Nairne – like Tsindos making his Scottish Opera debut – and tenor Osian Wyn Bowen, another Emerging Artist, did have the crowd-pleaser before the interval, however, in their duet from Les pecheurs de perles.
Mezzo Shakira Tsindos had her share of the spotlight too, but her voice seemed less suited to Handel and Gluck than it was to Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia later on, although her Bertarido blended well with Drummond’s Rodelinda in their duet. Soprano Zoe Drummond, one the company’s current cohort of Emerging Artists, certainly had the best of it here, with solos from Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden and Gounod’s Mireille in the first half of the programme. Such is the nature of the artform in repertoire ancient and modern.
It would be a challenging assignment to compile a programme for one of Scottish Opera’s regular four-singers-and-a-piano tours that did not favour the women with the more dramatic music.
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