Paul Keogan / Reviews

The Scottish Opera orchestra, under the baton of Derek Clark, delivers Sullivan’s exhilarating score with colourful, expressive gusto. It is, all-in-all, a marvellously no-holds-barred staging of an absolutely joyous comic opera.There is, in The Gondoliers, a few jokes at the expense of, Gilbert’s bugbear, the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1862 (whereby a large company, such as a major football club, to take an entirely random example, could declare itself bust, leaving creditors out of pocket, at very little personal expense to the major shareholders). There’s very much more on the subject in G&S’s lesser-known opera Utopia, Limited.Given a smart and engaging treatment here as a semi-staged concert (which plays at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh on November 5), the piece is an enjoyable comedy in which the Anglophile King of Utopia declares his country a “company limited”.As Ireland is joked about in parenthetical asides, Gilbert makes an interestingly modern observation. In his passion for all things British, the Utopian regent makes no distinction at all between “Englishness” and “Britishness”.

Scottish Opera uses colour and movement to conjure up a feast for the eyes and ears. Derek Clark sets a good pace for the numbers, a few faster than might be expected. The orchestral excellence was very much appreciated and it was nice that the audience of traditional theatregoers allowed the overture to run in absolute silence. The brilliant string playing by a large section was perhaps occasionally drowned by ‘delicately-modulated’ brass in vocal passages, but this did not affect the singing, which was magnificent throughout.