Greek
★★★★★
Dunedin Consort
★★★★☆
Mark-Anthony Turnage’s 1988 opera Greek and the Steven Berkoff play on which it is based were both scathing denunciations of Thatcher’s torn-apart Britain, presented under the guise of updating the Oedipus myth to modern London. Well, the nation is tearing itself apart again, and the opera is back.
In a razor-sharp new Scottish Opera/Opera Ventures production by Joe Hill-Gibbins, incisively conducted by Stuart Stratford, it has lost none of its scabrous power. It’s a condensed cry of rage about the moral squalor of humanity in which Turnage’s punk-influenced, percussion-driven music brilliantly matches the demotic brutality and occasional poetic oases of Berkoff’s words. At one point the orchestral players are even required to pick up riot-shields and bash them with truncheons.
Hill-Gibbins is wise, however, to leaven the polemics with humour. True, the laughs dry up in the second part, when Eddy (the Oedipus figure) contemplates gouging his eyes out, Greek-style, before exclaiming “Bollocks to all that” — a line more opera composers should use. Before that, though, the piece is played almost as a vaudeville at the front of the stage, with stylised gestures and corny dance routines.
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Fantastic performances (and lightning costume changes) from the four singers — Susan Bullock, Allison Cook, Alex Otterburn and Andrew Shore — but why so many empty seats when there were just two performances? Poor publicity? Or are Edinburgh’s festivalgoers scared of a little provocation?
Glorious singing in a very different idiom at the Queen’s Hall, as John Butt’s excellent period-instrument Dunedin Consort explored the connection between those early 17th-century giants, Monteverdi and Schütz. The highlight (and a scholarly coup) was a performance of Monteverdi’s supersize madrigal, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, in a German translation now attributed to Schütz himself.
Whether it is or isn’t, the change to explosive German consonants seems to intensify the fury of the fatal duel between the two lovers. The sung narration was delivered by Nicholas Mulroy with such prestissimo fervour that he was gasping for breath at the end, while Sophie Bevan and Gwilym Bowen brought out the pathos as the unwitting lovers.
Thank heavens that this, the International Festival’s first concert, was a triumph because the EIF’s much-vaunted Standard Life Opening Event, called Bloom, was a real dud: a looped 20-minute show from 59 Productions that projected vacuous psychedelic patterns onto the façades of St Andrew Square with even more forgettable music pumped up to ear-splitting levels. What a bloomin’ waste of money — including £100,000 from the Scottish government.