Dvořák’s dark fable is a triumphant, melodious Festival treat.
📍Festival Theatre
📅 Aug 6 – 9
🕖 7:15pm
🕖 Running time (approx.): 3 hours 30 minutes
👥 Composer: Dvořák
✍️ Libretto: Jaroslav Kvapil
🎶 Company: Garsington Opera
👥 Conductor Philharmonia Orchestra: Douglas Boyd
👥 Director: Jack Furness
🎬 Supported by: Coutts plus Geoff and Mary Ball
💰 From £32
🎂 Age undefined: parent’s discretion
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Wheelchair Accessible Toilet, Audio Enhancement
Utterly fabulous is the best way to describe the experience of Rusalka at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. The tale of a water nymph, one Rusalka, led astray by her dreams of a life on land, and the embrace of a handsome prince, the plot has obvious parallels with Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid. Kvapil however, drawing on the works of Czech folklorists, Karel Jaromir Erben and Bozena Nemcov, envisioned no eucatasrophe with which to remedy the narrative’s tragic trajectory. Suffice to say: expect no happy endings here.
Stepping in for an unwell Natalya Romaniw, Welsh Soprano Elin Pritchard took the title roll this August 8th, producing a stunning, and memorable performance. This isn’t the first time Pritchard has covered for Romaniw, having taken the role during Garsington Opera’s home residency in Oxford back in June, and it showed. Demonstrating absolute comfort in the role, Pritchard is simply heart-breaking, her water nymph a creature of the most delicate passions; her voice a thrilling, soaring, and rich Soprano.
About her stalks, prances, soars, and slithers a fabulous array of characters, each lovingly brought to life by a cast at the top of their game. Inestimably enhancing the production’s enchantment, Tom Piper’s magnificent set separates watery underworld, from harsh overworld through an enormous circle raised & lowered drawbridge-like. Beneath glimmers an expansive pool to home the opera’s nymphs and goblins, a circular cut-out in the great ‘O’ the portal betwixt it, and land above. A forest of elegant steelwork, and bridges above, makes both a rope-filled home for forest creatures, and a stately promenade for glittering princesses. Bathed in Malcolm Rippeth’s storybook perfect lighting, and marshalled to an elegant perfection by Choreographer Fleur Darkin and Circus Choreographer Lina Johannson, the players strut their 3 and a half hours on stage with abundant style.
Of The Philharmonia’s most accomplished accompaniment there can be no criticism; what an absolute delight to press one of the country’s most accomplished symphony orchestras into the Edinburgh Festival Theatre pit! Grand Opera is usually distinguished by the scale of it’s set, but this production benefits from sheer sonic grandeur. Dvořák‘s immensely romantic, if sinisterly shaded masterpiece, rolls out into the Festival Theatre, an evolving caress, speckled with discord. At turns sweet, at others sinister, Dvořák explores the shadows left untouched by any sugar-plumb fairy.
To the cast entire, only kudos are due, a multi-talented assemblage of superb talents. Rusalka’s disastrous, and inconstant love-interest, Prince is made a man of contrasts, drawn to purity, but damned by passion by versatile, and vocally thrilling tenor, Gerard Schneider. Rusalka’s father, the water goblin Vodník, cuts a grand and solemn figure, his advisements and fateful prognostications intoned with Musa Ngqungwana’s rolling, resounding bass.
When Rusalka inevitably seeks out feared witch Ježibaba, to obtain a potion to transfigure faerie to human flesh, Mezzo soprano Christine Rice nigh-slithers from her skull-like cottage to oblige. Rice revels in the role, her promises and warnings delightfully, and darkly shaded. However it’s the Foreign Princess, Rusalka’s nemesis in love, who draws the delighted boos come curtain calls. A striking figure, Sky Ingram’s voice cuts the Festival Theatre with crystalline clarity, shaded in villainous hauteur.
Laurel crowns are also due to the trio of Forest Nymphs who hold court over the natural world above water. Marlena Devoe, Heather Lowe, and Stephanie Wake-Edwards make a luxurious and mercurial choir, their silvan court brought to fullest list by a fabulous team of acrobats & aerialists. Lithe bodies dance amidst a rope forest, their rhythmic dance rising and falling in time to the wonderous music. Indeed no scene, nor setting is left unfulfilled, from the deer carcasses hung from the kitchen ceiling in the Prince’s abode, to the stark light and shadow attending the opera’s denouement.
Director Jack Furness has created that rarest of things, the complete operatic experience. In turns glorious, sweet, bathed in romance, but never shying from the fable’s dark heart, Rusalka is quite the emotional rollercoaster. It was, and is, a privilege to experience.
(Image Credit: Clive Barda)
