Nights at the Trojans

The opera critic of the Daily Telegraph, reviewing the Edinburgh Festival production of Berlioz’s The Trojans from the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, found little to write in its favour - the Guardian, giving the whole show only two stars, found even less. The man  sitting  in the next  seat to the Telegraph critic in the Festival Theatre, sharing the critical opinion, muttered during the interval his own form of deprecation.  ”If this was Scottish  Opera,” he said,  “you’d think it was pretty good. But for this festival you expect something  better.”

In fact there was a time when Scottish Opera did things quite as well as, and quite often better than, other companies appearing at the festival. Its first production of The Trojans, in Peter Diamand’s sterling years as director, was an impressive success. So was its second, staged outwith the festival. Its festival presentations of Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers, Berg’s Wozzeck, Gluck’s Alceste, Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen,   Wagner’s Die Walkure, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Britten’s Peter Grimes (in a Colin Graham production supervised by the composer himself), an unnerving Turn of the Screw, and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin were all world-class events  in the company’s earlier history.

Its  festival debut in 1967 with an imaginative production of The Rake’s Progress during  Peter Diamand’s Stravinsky year, won the recognition it deserved. Lord Harewood, in his introduction to a book I wrote about the company,  said that Scottish Opera  had speedily attained festival standard. You could say, he added, where it was not yet perhaps quite as good as another company appearing at the festival, and you could say where it was better, but it was unquestionably of international class.  

At that time the company’s  attainments spoke for themselves. Its aspirations were  never in doubt. The London critics, dissatisfied with much of what they saw down south, came north and raved. This was a company that was going places, and we all knew it.
30 August 2014