Scottish Opera: Tristan und Isolde, Glasgow review: 'magnificent'
This staged performance of Tristan und Isolde focused with searing insight on what the opera is all about, writes David Kettle
Scottish Opera: Tristan und Isolde, Theatre Royal, Glasgow ★★★★
You could make a persuasive case that a semi-staged concert performance is actually the most convincing option for Wagner’s mammoth philosophical meditation on myth, love, sex and death Tristan und Isolde. After all, it’s an opera for the mind, the imagination, maybe even the body, with its focus on inner lives and spiritual longings rather than fast-moving action. Certainly director Justin Way’s modest but effective concert staging for Scottish Opera worked a treat, with simple props and costumes providing just enough context for Wagner’s immense vocal soliloquies and dialogues, bringing the storyline to life but also accepting it’s really just a vehicle for the composer’s spiritual and philosophical ponderings.
Way’s small-scale staging also threw the focus squarely on the singers, and they were a very strong bunch. Gwyn Hughes Jones might have been somewhat inscrutable as romantic lead Tristan in the opening acts, but he threw everything into a deliriously committed, often harrowing dying Tristan in Act III. Katherine Broderick, meanwhile, was magnificent as his lover Isolde, every inch the haughty wronged princess in Act I, while giddy on girlish joy in Act II. Richard Wiegold was a splendid stand-in as the betrayed King Marke, noble yet profoundly damaged too. Hangsung Yoo made for a forceful Kurwenal but could probably have done with a little more light and shade in his powerfully projected performance, while Khatuna Mikaberidze was agile and silvery as Isolde’s maid Brangäne.
And the Orchestra of Scottish Opera – evocatively lit by Lizzie Powell – provided a powerfully appropriate backdrop for the production, putting Wagner’s radical harmonic adventures and shifting orchestral colours quite literally centre-stage. The players were on exceptional form, in an immaculate, velvety Prelude and almost tactile opening to Act III, and conductor Stuart Stratford – spotlit throughout, and rightfully so – ensured sonic power but also subtle poetry in Wagner’s ever-shifting musical themes. Did it lack a full staging’s opulence? If anything, it focused with searing insight on what Tristan und Isolde is all about. A magnificent performance.
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