There was a preponderance of Christmas jumpers in the all-age audience for Scottish Opera’s last production of 2023 – a concert (semi-staged) performance of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel.

Director Roxana Haines makes good use of the stage in front of the Scottish Opera orchestra, giving plenty room for Hansel (Lea Shaw) and Gretel (Catriona Hewitson) to dance and play in an endearingly child-like way. Shaw and Hewitson are clearly close, as siblings, while still squabbling and vying for position.

The props are minimal – a chair, with a drawing of a jug on a piece of card, a basket and a couple of biscuits, and so on – as is the scenery; the witch’s house is painted on a cloth held by two of the Junior Chorus and so is the oven. The Junior Chorus works hard, by the way, roped in as stage hands to clear the stage of the few props at scene changes, for example the torn-up card when mother Gertrude ‘breaks’ the jug in a fit of frustration / temper.  

Shuna Scott Sendall, singing both Gertrude and the Witch, is clearly a mother at the end of her tether, unable to cope any more with the relentless round of scrabbling for some form of a living. She just wants a moment’s peace and the children Out Of Her Sight, and sends them off to the wood without thinking. When her husband Peter comes home, happy and with supplies of food, appalled, she realises what she has done. Ross Cumming is a robust Peter, open and happy – not the drunk rolling home from town as the character is sometimes portrayed – and Gertrude can depend on him to find the children, even as he is horrified to hear what has happened to them.

Meanwhile, in the forest, after playing and scoffing strawberries, under the influence of Inna Husieva’s Sandman, the children sing their evening prayer beautifully, and fall asleep. Their doll and soft toy are left on stage in the children’s positions for the interval, after which the children return and are awakened by Husieva’s Dew Fairy; in both roles she sings charmingly. They soon find the witch’s house, and the witch herself – Sendall enjoying herself with the witchy voice, although her lowest notes are lost to the orchestra.

When the children’s resourcefulness wins against the witch, they also release the other child victims of the witch; the Junior Chorus, in Christmas jumpers, sing sweetly and movingly of their blindness. It is not long before Peter’s and Gertrude’s second, daylight, attempt to find Hansel and Gretel is rewarded. Re-united, they join in the final chorus.

Stuart Stratford conducts the orchestra with aplomb, joining in the action by holding out a baton / wand for the witch, later returned by Hansel. The playing bowls along steadily, with some nice horns coming through in the morning, and the audience goes out into the December dark well entertained.