MacVicar stages Covid opera in a car park

From Hugh Kerr of Edinburgh Music Review:

Scottish Opera are very lucky that the busiest opera producer in the world David McVicar is a Glaswegian and the pandemic has seen him at home in Glasgow rather than attending to his many productions overseas. This has given him time to work on this new production of Verdi’s ‘Falstaff’,  a production which is going to be shared appropriately with Santa Fe’s open air opera house but also in a Edinburgh Festival production at the Festival Theatre with a small socially distanced audience.

Scottish Opera have overcome the challenge of the pandemic by staging the opera in a large tent in the car park next to their production shed at Edington Street, Glasgow. The orchestra were placed undercover in the shed with an open door where you could just see the conductor, Stuart Stratford, but the music and the singers were amplified from the large stage. Now we should be clear this was not the quality of sound you would get in an opera house. It was clear but perhaps a little metallic and it was loud, at times very loud! I spoke to an audience member at the interval who admitted she used ear plugs to diminish the sound, and I who use very expensive hearing aids, at times found it a little painful. Also the seats were very uncomfortable, and the tent was open at the side (presumably to blow away the virus), and the seats socially distanced, so it was cold and lacked the excitement of a full opera house.

Having said all that, this was theatrically the most exciting ‘Falstaff’ I have seen in over 50 years of opera going…

Read on here.