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February 10, 2005
Scottish Opera: The Knot Garden
Scottish Opera’s new production of Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden opened in Glasgow on 19 January. I saw it in Edinburgh on 3 February. It is a difficult opera - probably the most inaccessible piece I’ve been to since Karl-Birger Blomdahl’s science fiction opera Aniara at the Stockholm Opera when I was 17. I went into the Knot Garden ‘cold’, having failed to to get hold of a text beforehand, and was able to catch very few of the words, despite the fact that it’s in English.
I would have appreciated surtitles. The allusions to Shakespeare’s The Tempest may be obvious, but the continually changing orientation of the characters is confusing without understanding all the words. The orchestral music is fascinating, but always seems to have priority over the vocal writing, with the singers often struggling to make themselves heard over the climaxes.
Was Scottish Opera fearless or foolhardy in presenting this work? Not perhaps the obvious choice for a financially-strapped company under political siege! Nevertheless the production by Antony McDonald was excellent and all the singers, Peter Savidge, Jane Irwin, Rachel Nicholls, Andrew Shore, Hilton Marlton, Derrick Parker, and Rachel Hynes were committed and effective, even if they didn’t succeed in making the vocal writing sound very beautiful. Richard Armstrong, the Music Director of Scottish Opera, did a fine job. He seems to be more at home with cerebral 20th-century works like the Tippett than he does with mainstream lyrical Italian and German works.
Posted by Simon Holledge at February 10, 2005 09:18 PM
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