THE DIARY OF ONE WHO DISAPPEARED (Scottish Opera/Lammemuir Festival at the Theatre Royal Glasgow)****

 

By Cal

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhBVPT3DIFU

Available until: Unknown

The Diary of One Who Disappeared was filmed under social distancing guidelines and I think it’s a really good choice of repertoire. The cast is small, which makes it easier to social distance. It’s also only just over half an hour, which would be a much smaller risk than a piece of two hours or more.

It’s not an opera in the traditional sense. Some people describe it as a song cycle and I can understand why. The story isn’t really acted out. The farmer is the narrator, describing his interactions with a beautiful gypsy girl, Zefka (who I’m glad to say isn’t as evil as gypsies in literature tend to be and personally, I don’t see their relationship as a bad thing), but he doesn’t interact directly with her. So it makes perfect sense for her not to be standing next to him and for there not to be any physical contact between them. They don’t need to act out the scene because she appears in the farmer’s memory.

I think there’s also a chance the gypsy girl isn’t real. As Lucy Schaufer, who plays Zefka, doesn’t have dark hair, that does kind of increase my feeling that the events described might not be completely true – or perhaps the whole thing is a fantasy.

Or perhaps the tenor isn’t even the farmer at all. The title says it’s a ‘diary’, so maybe the tenor is the person who finds the diary and reads it aloud and the gypsy appears how he imagines her, based on the descriptions.

However you explain this work (and there are lots of different ways of explaining it), the social distancing works.

Stuart Stratford conducts a very small and socially-distanced ensemble, but they produce a rich sound, full of colours, and seem to fill the Theatre Royal Glasgow well. Ed Lyon sings the main tenor role, his performance full of emotion. The opera is in Czech, but you can tell what he’s feeling just from watching him – the subtitles just provide the details. Lucy Schaufer gives the gypsy girl an appropriate air of mystery in a rich, dark voice that makes me wish she had more to sing.

Scottish Opera really have made some very clever choices for their online performances. It will be interesting to see what they come up with next.