UK Edition
Review
The Vanishing Bridegroom, review: for all its wit and ingenuity, the score never quite delivers
The reputation of Judith Weir, the Queen’s Master of Music, took a terrible battering after her fourth full-scale opera, the all too aptly named Miss Fortune, collapsed in a dismal flop at Covent Garden in 2012. But now it must be time for some reappraisal of her off-beat talent for music theatre, so this sparky revival of her second full-scale opera The Vanishing Bridegroom is especially welcome.
First performed in 1990 by Scottish Opera, its heart lies firmly north of the border. The text, written by Weir herself, is drawn from three simple tales of the Western Highlands and Islands loosely threaded into a connected narrative. A woman shuttled between a rich husband and a romantic lover is robbed in a wood; the husband is then spirited away by the fairies on his way to find a priest to christen the couple’s daughter; and when the husband returns like Rip van Winkle many years later, he finds his daughter being courted by a man who turns out to be the devil.
There is no obvious moral to all this, and no great dramatic impetus or ringing conclusion either; Weir has always been more engaged by the bizarre, the elliptical and the opaque, in a world in which the natural interacts with the supernatural and the boundaries of reality are left fluid. Her music has a similar desire to tease and surprise, and those in search of thumping tunes or hard-edged modernism will be disappointed.
Instead the tapestry is woven silkily out of the improvisations of the Gaelic Psalm-singing tradition, the rhythmic waulking songs that women chanted when weaving tweed and the ballads of the region, many of them cautionary tales of malevolent sprites. The effect is mercurially playful, but sometimes one is left craving something more blunt and visceral: for all its wit and ingenuity, the score never quite delivers.
British Youth Opera, a summer school that showcases post-graduate singers about to enter the industry, has done a fine job on the production, and both Stuart Barker’s staging and James Holmes’ conducting of the Southbank Sinfonia are ideally fresh and forthright. In a strong and enthusiastic ensemble cast I was particularly struck by the rich lyric soprano of Alexandra Lowe as the bride and Timothy Edlin piquantly trebling up as a doctor, a policeman and the devil himself, finally given his comeuppance.
Until 8 September, in repertory with Don Giovanni.
Tickets: 0207 863 8222; www.peacocktheatre.com