Alexandra Coghlan

Grimes triumphant

Elsewhere in Edinburgh, Ivan Fischer’s ‘staged concert’ of Don Giovanni was a limp affair compared to the ferocity of this weaponised Grimes

‘Peter Grimes!’ Ranked high above us in the Usher Hall — a mob smelling blood, hot for the kill — the chorus let forth those three primal cries, and we were all lost. The modesty-curtain of civilisation was torn away, and our basest human urges — hate, revenge, suspicion of difference, delight at weakness — were exposed. Looking up at those faces, shielded by no proscenium, separated by no stage lighting, I don’t know when I have ever felt more horrified, more shaken by a performance.

‘A staged concert,’ writes conductor Ivan Fischer, ‘looks for complete harmony and coordination between music and theatre… for organic unity in which vocal and acting skills merge completely.’ He’s not wrong. But nor is he alone in recognising the infinite theatrical possibility of opera in concert. Sadly, his own Edinburgh International Festival Don Giovanni (designed, he laboriously explained, as a ‘staged concert’ and definitely not a ‘semi-staging’, with all the half-heartedness that implies) was a limp affair compared to the ferocity of this weaponised Grimes.

No amount of semantic play or rhetorical sleight-of-hand could conceal the fact that this Giovanni — conducted and directed by Fischer himself — was over-conceptualised and under-realised. ‘The singers will play themselves, wearing their own evening dress,’ he claimed. But that of course was nonsense. What we got was a black-box production in which an approximately costumed cast improvised a basic staging. Were it not for the densely coloured orchestral playing and the unusual chorus we might have been watching a show at the Edinburgh Fringe and not the International Festival.

Made up of students from Budapest’s University of Theatre and Film Arts, the chorus, whitewashed and loin-clothed like a whole gallery of Pygmalion’s sculptures come to life, were the living furniture and fabric of a world viewed through the Don’s lustful eyes.

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