Opera Reviews
29 March 2024
Untitled Document

A tale of the impossibility of crossing cultures



by Catriona Graham
Dvorak: Rusalka
Scottish Opera
April 2016

Deep in the Czech forest, something stirs – the emotions of Dvorák’s water nymph Rusalka.

In Scottish Opera’s revival of Grange Park Opera’s production, director and designer Antony McDonald set the Acts 1 and 3 action deep in the forest, centred on a lake with dark, billowing waves, surrounded by slanting fir trees. Scampering dryads, in autumnal brown, romp round and in the lake, till Vodnik the water goblin emerges from the deep.

His daughter, Rusalka, has fallen for a human and Anne Sophie Duprels sings her prayer to the Moon fervently. Given permission by her father – Willard White in fine voice - to risk all in leaving the lake, she calls on the witch Jezibaba to cast the necessary spell.

Leah-Marian Jones is no pointy-hatted, Halloween witch, in her elegant up-do and smartly tailored Edwardian-style two-piece with flounced bustle-cum-train. Her voice is sweetly reasonable as if she were negotiating a contract for services with Rusalka. The violence of giving a water nymph legs is merely glimpsed through Jezibaba’s window and Duprels’ first steps are painful to watch.

The price for Rusalka’s desire is muteness so, for most of Act 2, she is silent. The Kitchen Boy, however, is not. Clare Presland is excellent as the garrulous nephew of the gamekeeper, providing a stream of gossip and supposition which updates the kitchen staff (and audience) with developments. One can feel the exasperation of her uncle, a rather bluff Julian Hubbard.

Rusalka’s chamber is at the front of the stage, with the banquet set for the wedding feast, so we see her luxuriate in her bath while the visiting Foreign Princess (Natalya Romaniw in red bodycon) sets her cap at Peter Wedd’s Prince. When finally she is dressed for her wedding and sits at table, the male guests have reached the brandy and cigars stage. She rejects the poached fish course in horror, and fights the all-enveloping wedding veil like a fish in a net. Then father arrives, to learn of his daughter’s despair – ‘I am neither human nor nymph. I can neither live nor die’.

Even when motionless, as if cast in bronze, Willard White’s stage presence dominates the scene. He is appalled that the Prince is rejecting Rusalka for the Princess  - Wedd and Romaniw are dramatic and intense.

Back at the lake, Jezibaba offers Rusalka a knife to kill the prince, but she throws it – and her chance at redemption – in the lake. When the Prince is drawn there to find her, and begs her to kiss him, reluctantly she does so, knowing it brings him death.  As he slips out of life, she tenderly holds him and sings of her love and loss, more expressive for its gentleness.

Conductor Stuart Stratford is certainly impressing as the new Music Director and the orchestra responds well as do the singers, including the largely off-stage chorus. The vivacious choreography of Lucy Burge and lighting of Wolfgang Goebbel just add magic to this tale of the impossibility of crossing cultures. 
         

Text © Catriona Graham
Photo © James Glossop
Support us by buying from amazon.com!