TThe 2024 Edinburgh International Festival, and the Philharmonia Orchestra’s residency with the event, concluded with a concert of Richard Strauss’s final opera, Capriccio, a work that premiered in Munich in 1942 and is forever tainted by its approval by the Third Reich.
The programme had been created by the festival’s former head of music, Andrew Moore, to celebrate the EIF’s partnership with Sir Andrew Davies, who recently conducted an unforgettable Wagner opera concert at the Usher Hall and made his debut as an opera conductor half a century ago with Glyndebourne productions.
Davis died before he could fulfill his promise, but a concert was organized in his memory by Germany-based British conductor Alexander Soddi and a stellar line-up of soloists led by Malin Byström as the Countess.
The Philharmonia Orchestra was in top form, particularly the front desk string soloists (who played with great agility to meet the theatrical demands of the score) and first horn Norberto Lopez, and Soddi, a seasoned operatic specialist, was a dynamic presence on the podium, keeping the somewhat comical but often heartily entertaining story flowing.
A scene in which baritone poet Olivier (Stephen Marsh) and tenor composer Flamand (Sebastian Kohlhepp) compete for the Countess’s affections is like a courtroom parade of witnesses for Capriccio’s debate about the relative value of text and music.
The female cast – Bystrom, Sarah Connolly as Clarion, an actor who falls in love with the Count (Bo Skovs), and Emily Birsan as an Italian singer – provided a lively foil for baritone Skovs, and her brother-sister-like relationship with Bystrom was particularly memorable.
Among the male voices, Kohlhepp stood out, but so did bass Peter Rose as the somewhat emotionless La Roche, the theater director trying to control the Countess’s birthday celebrations.
But in the end, Byström’s show, in which she sang the final scene entirely from memory, enthralled the audience with the instrumentalists and the soprano’s fine music, even if the verdict on the central issue the opera raises was not dissimilar to the neutral “not proven” judgment of Scots law.
Capriccio remains a deeply ambiguous work that could easily be imagined as postmodern from a 21st-century perspective; it may contain an implicit critique of Nazi censorship, but it remains light and superficial for the dark ages of its premiere. Without Davis’s raison d’être, it would have felt a bit of an odd way to end the festival.
