‘SUMMER’S almost gone”, as Jim Morrison of The Doors sang. However, thanks to the lovely Lammermuir Festival of classical music, the summer festival season hasn’t yet concluded.
Running until September 16, this superb programme offers all manner of performances throughout East Lothian, ranging from a recital by the great French soprano Véronique Gens on Tuesday to next Friday’s concert of Janáček by the acclaimed musical quintet ZRI.
The programme got off to a dazzling start with Scottish Opera’s new production of Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera Albert Herring.
Created specifically for the Lammermuir Festival, director Daisy Evans’s production tells a comic tale that was freely adapted – in 1947, by Britten and his librettist Eric Crozier – from a novella by Guy de Maupassant.
The opera is set in Loxford, a fictional market town in East Sussex, where the local worthies have decided that the girls of the area are of such poor moral repute that the traditional May Queen celebrations will be scrapped this year.
They will instead elect a May King, in the unimpeachable shape of young Albert Herring. The grocer’s son is, the formidable Lady Billows and her fellow councillors agree, a paragon of Christian virtue.
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Albert lives under the strict instruction of his puritanical mother. Unlike others among the local youth – such as the prophetically named Sid and Nancy – the grocer’s boy forswears the pleasures of sex and drink.
What ensues is an extremely funny tale of municipal moralism, barefaced hypocrisy and chaotic justice. This modern dress production is set, in Kat Heath’s splendid design, in Loxford’s somewhat timeworn town hall.
There – assisted by her housekeeper, the archetypal nosey neighbour Florence Pike – the aforementioned Lady Billows towers over proceedings. Characterised fabulously by the brilliant soprano Susan Bullock, the redoubtable aristocrat appears like a cross between Oscar Wilde’s monstrous Lady Bracknell and the late guardian of British morality Mary Whitehouse.
Even before poor Albert is roped into his unwanted (but handsomely remunerated) role as the village virgin, the seeds of the coming festival of hypocrisy have already been sown. As the May carnival deliberations begin in earnest, it’s obvious, for instance, that the Anglican vicar Mr Gedge is in hot pursuit of the local headteacher Miss Wordsworth.
The May King celebrations collapse into a hilarious scene of Bacchanalian excess (complete with Albert’s supposedly chaste mother dragging the willing copper PC Budd off-stage for an amorous liaison).
Britten’s score gives these proceedings an almost sarcastic lightness. Under the baton of William Cole, the orchestra of Scottish Opera renders the orchestrations for harp and wind instruments with a near-frivolous whimsicality.
Fine, larger-than-life performances abound throughout the universally excellent cast. Glen Cunningham’s Albert is, by turns, convincingly wholesome, humorously peeved and energetically liberated. It’s great, too, to see the errant school girls played with such impudence by Cliona Cassidy, Sarah Power and Audrey Tsang.
For a piece created almost 80 years ago, Albert Herring still has a satirical edge. This impressive production does it memorable justice.
At Theatre Royal, Glasgow, October 18-22; and Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, November 13.
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