A total (and often gripping) theatrical experience: Scottish Opera’s Ainadamar reviewed

Do you remember Osvaldo Golijov? Two decades ago he was classical music’s Next Big Thing: a credible postmodernist with a lush and listenable tonal flair, and an Argentinian with an interestingly complex European heritage in a millennium where everyone agreed – for a while, anyway – that the future was Latin American. Major labels recorded his music as soon as it was premièred; he was popular. Too popular for some – I remember a contemporary music promoter lamenting, with the demeanour of a housemaster who’s just found the head boy smoking behind the bins, that Golijov ‘hadn’t developed as we’d hoped’. Anyhow, Golijov was big, and then something stalled. Commissions failed to materialise, there were rumours of creative block, and the parade moved on.

So here we are in 2022, finally witnessing the ‘Scottish première and first staged UK production’ of Golijov’s 2003 opera Ainadamar. Note those qualifications: Ainadamar was snapped up for a UK première towards the peak of Goli-mania in 2008 (not in a theatre, but by the CBSO in Birmingham) and it hasn’t been seen here since. The impression left by that 2008 concert performance was of an essentially static work, a dramatic cantata with the emphasis on the cantata rather than the dramatic. If nothing else, this new production by Deborah Colker for Scottish Opera puts the record straight. The visual dimension adds immeasurably to the score’s effectiveness. Ainadamar belongs in the theatre.

But Colker goes further – conceiving an onstage world that makes sense of the dream-like flashbacks and narrative layers of David Henry Hwang’s libretto, and presenting it with a bravura that matches (some might say rescues) Golijov’s smoky, flamenco-infused music. The story, condensed into a slightly overlong 80 minutes, is the death of Federico Garcia Lorca, told in flashback by the actress Margarita Xirgu, star of Lorca’s Mariana Pineda.