The Marriage of Figaro Purists beware. This uncompromising rethink dares to play fast and loose with one of the great icons of the operatic repertoire, courtesy of Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s fast-paced staging making its first visit to the UK from Berlin’s Komische Oper. Serebrennikov is as determined and single-minded in real life as he is in his productions: he stood up to charges of embezzlement in Putin’s Russia (dropped after international condemnation of his case) and now lives in Germany.
Likewise, his upstairs-downstairs production offers a literal separation of the opera’s aristocracy and servants, as well as inviting in tunes from elsewhere in Mozart’s output and even inventing new characters. Conductor James Gaffigan has a top-class cast of soloists direct from Berlin. Serebrennikov’s production is clearly conceived to prod and provoke, and will no doubt do just that in August – but whether audiences clutch their pearls or grin knowingly at its audacity, it’s sure to leave quite an impression.
Festival Theatre, 16-18 August Oedipus Rex Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. From hot-headed excess to cool detachment: Stravinsky’s 1927 Oedipux Rex is barely an opera at all, but instead an indefinable mix of narration, declamation and ritual (performed for the most part in Latin), based on Sophocles’s tragedy that’s itself two and a half millennia old. Stravinsky himself suggested a largely static, minimal staging with masked singers.
Scottish Opera’s promenade production clearly dispenses with those requests, leading its audience through spaces within the vast expanses of the National Museum of Scotland. The dream team of director Roxana Haines and designer Anna Orton were behind Scottish Opera’s magnificent outdoor La bohème during the dark days of the pandemic: they’ll surely have plenty to say with Stravinsky’s monumental masterpiece, helped along its way by a fine cast and a 100-strong community chorus. National Museum of Scotland, 12-19 August Così fan tutte Advertisement The Festival’s second Mozart/da Ponte opera is a far more slippery affair than its staged Marriage of Figaro, its surface charm and wit concealing darker questions of desire, fidelity and whether women can ever really be trusted.
Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra gave an outstanding Magic Flute at last year’s Festival, and they return with a starry line-up of soloists – among them Golda Schultz and Christopher Maltman – for what promises to be a vivid, incisive and dramatically thrilling concert performance. Usher Hall, 10 August Capriccio Rather fittingly, Richard Strauss’s valedictory final opera serves not only as the Festival’s closing concert, but also as a fond farewell to frequent EIF visitor Sir Andrew Davis, originally slated to conduct the performance before his death in April (British conductor Alexander Soddy, who’s led several German companies, has stepped in). Swedish soprano Malin Byström as the Countess who must judge between poetry and music is the big draw, but the Philharmonia Orchestra is joined by a strong cast including Bo Skovhus and Dame Sarah Connolly.
Usher Hall, 25 August Carmen In his innovative new production of Carmen, travelling to the Festival Theatre for the EIF after hugely successful runs at Paris’s Opéra-Comique and Zurich Opera, German-born director Andreas Homoki has responded to the inherent unreality of the piece by shifting eras for each act, rather than locations. The central story of a sultry Seville seductress and the amorous spell she casts on reluctant recruit Don José remains, however, complete with gypsies, bullfights and sparkling tunes. Festival Theatre, 4, 6 & 8 August For more information, and to book tickets, visit www.
eif.co.uk.
