Daphne review – Scottish Opera’s semi-staged Strauss is in masterly hands

Scottish Opera’s relationship with the Lammermuir festival has supplied the East Lothian event with a varied diet of big opening shows, measured on its own scale. Transplanted to the company’s home venue, giving Glasgow a preview of the Lammermuir show as an early season-opener, this concert staging of Richard Strauss’s late one-act return to the world of Greek myth inevitably looked less grand.

Director Emma Jenkins has impressive form in making smaller shows work for Scottish Opera, including a recent Opera Highlights tour, and particularly a National Opera Studio residency showcase in February last year on this same stage.

With a huge orchestra in the pit, she had only the front of that stage to work with, and so relied on props and costuming to suggest the difficulties faced by Strauss at the time of the work’s composition. Her concept was not overstated, however, and if a Marcel wave and a bentwood chair did not shout “Weimar Germany” or a white rose “Nazi resistance”, little would have been lost.

But ultimately this piece is all about the music, in the rich orchestration and the demanding vocal writing, and Scottish Opera’s recent casting skill was very much in evidence with company favourites South Korean soprano Hye-Youn Lee superb in the title role and bass-baritone Dingle Yandell playing her father, Peneios, like song-and-dance-man Jack Buchanan. The two debutantes in the cast, Brad Cooper as a Luger-wielding jack-booted Apollo, and especially Claire Barnett-Jones as Daphne’s mother Gaea, took longer to make their full impact over the swell of sound conductor Stuart Stratford was encouraging from the instrumentalists, and the tenor’s strutting tended towards the scenery-chewing, had there been any to chew.

The smaller roles were all in capable hands, often those of present and past Scottish Opera Emerging Artists, and a recent graduate of that scheme, Chinese tenor Shengzhi Ren, was a revelation as Leukippos, the young man in love with Daphne. His was a heroic performance, in his portrayal of the character and his precise vocal assurance.

Ultimately, though, the orchestra stole the show, with magnificent playing from the wind soloists and brilliant ensemble work in all the details of Strauss’s masterly scoring. Stratford’s direction of the incremental unfolding of Daphne’s final transformation was flawless. Not only was this the Scottish premiere of the work, but apparently not one of these musicians had ever played a note of it before.