Opera
Ainadamar
Theatre Royal, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
*****
WHEN he was brought on stage at the curtain call by Scottish Opera Music Director Stuart Stratford and production director Deborah Colker, Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov looked suitably delighted with what he had just witnessed.

Well he might be, because while deadlines have passed for the completion of his second opera, Colker and Stratford had just delivered a revival of his debut, almost twenty years after its premiere, that seems certain to receive the same acclaim when it is seen in the home venues of co-production partners Detroit Opera and the Metropolitan in New York.

Ainadamar (“Fountain of Tears”) is a powerful 80-minute immersion in the creative life and assassination during the Spanish Civil War of writer Federico Garcia Lorca, as recalled by his muse, actress Margarita Xirgu, to her student, Nuria.

Brazilian choreographer Colker, whose work with her own company sits alongside commissions from Cirque du Soleil and the Rio Olympics, has created a compact visual spectacle of movement and projection on a circular curtain that references a bullring as well as other arenas of brutality. A quartet of dancers with a startling range of professional experience are joined by an all-female chorus that moves as well as it sounds on a set by Jon Bauser of precision-engineered moveable platforms, all brilliantly lit by Paul Keogan.

In the pit the Orchestra of Scottish Opera is on magnificent form, delivering a remarkable range of musicality, more accomplished in the Latin rhythms of Golijov’s consistently attractive score than anyone might have predicted, with principal trumpet Paul Bosworth, and the onstage percussion and guitar of Stuart Semple and Ian Watt to the fore.

In the principal roles, Scottish Opera continues to demonstrate its deft hand in casting with three superb company debuts. For my money it was Samantha Hankey, in the trouser role as Lorca, whose astonishing mezzo range made her the star turn, her Mariana aria utterly exquisite. But others will surely single out Lauren Fagan’s equally commanding Margarita or the beautiful voice of Colombian soprano Julieth Lozano as Nuria, and it would be foolish to argue. 

Of the highest quality in every department, this revival is also more timely than many would wish, not least with an eye on the elections in Colker’s native Brazil. Colker augments the cadences of David Henry Hwang’s fine libretto with projections of fascist slogans of the Franco regime, latterly superseded by the contrasting humanity of the poetry of Lorca himself. Echoes of religious iconography abound in her staging of those closing scenes, with the work’s titular song becoming a sort of Hallelujah Chorus, just as the words of the moving trio towards the work’s end echo the Last Supper.

Further performances in Glasgow on November 2 & 5 and at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre on November 8,10, & 12