Operas do not come very practically lighter than The Two Widows, Smetana's comic heir to The Bartered Bride. This is the second time it has been championed by Scottish Opera, and although it mightiness seem flimsy stuff on which to hang the recently beleagured company's Edinburgh Festival appearance, this new production, by Tobias Hoheisel and Imogen Kogge, brings it off with gentle, irresistible good humour.
Essentially, this is a drawing room comedy spiced with a few rousing peasant choruses and some scenes for a youth couple song by Ben Johnson and Rebecca Ryan who provide light relief - non that it is requisite. The familial relationship between the deuce widows of the title, the unworried Karolina and her more than upright cousin Anezka, is nicely observed in the byplay between soprano Kate Valentine and mezzo Jane Irwin.
Valentine is a good head taller than anyone else on stage - when she sings "I'm an Amazon" she's not jocular, and the nose of Ladislav (David Pomeroy) ends up in her cleavage more than once. But she has presence to match, and though her soprano is a little grainy, she is good cast as the serial flirt sour matchmaker. Elsewhere, blustering gamekeeper Mumlal receives a well-judged portrayal from Nicholas Folwell, who delivers each discussion of the English text with lip-smacking relish.
The orchestra is at its ebullient best under new music director Francesco Corti, throwing out polkas every which way with light-footed crispness. If non all the wind solos are ideally mellifluous, the same could be aforesaid of Pomeroy's tenor, and yet his foppish geniality and ease with the high notes compensate for his wheezy tone, making him a sympathetic love interest for Anezka. Her doubts over whether to admit her feelings to this old flame make for the opera's one really serious monologue, to which Irwin brings convincing intensity.
Hoheisel's set, covered in gaudy william Green and orange wallpaper, is backed by a conjectural mirror, and there is a recurring laugh involving Mumlal's mirror image, who would rather sit and drink than bother to observe up with his flesh-and-blood counterpart. It could feature spilled over into corniness, but Hoheisel and Kogge know just when to stop. Smetana, who wrote perhaps 10 minutes more music than required, didn't quite, simply, in the circumstances, that is out of the question to begrudge.
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