The 2024 Edinburgh international festival, and the residency at the event by the Philharmonia Orchestra, ended with a concert performance of Richard Strauss’s last opera, Capriccio, a piece forever tainted by the Third Reich approval of its first performance in Munich in 1942.
It was programmed by the festival’s former head of music, Andrew Moore, as a celebration of the EIF’s partnership with Sir Andrew Davis, conductor of unforgettable Wagner opera concerts at the Usher Hall in recent years, who made his opera-conducting debut with the work at Glyndebourne half a century previously.
Davis did not live to fulfil the engagement, but the concert went ahead in his memory with Germany-based British conductor Alexander Soddy and a luxury cast of soloists led by Malin Byström as the Countess.
The Philharmonia was on its best form – the front desk string soloists (highly mobile to fulfil the theatrical demands of the score) and first horn Norberto López in particular – and Soddy, a seasoned opera specialist, was a dynamic presence on the podium, keeping the slightly silly, but often genuinely funny, narrative flowing.
There’s something of the courtroom parade of witnesses about Capriccio’s debate on the relative merits of words and music, personified by baritone poet Olivier (Stephen Marsh) and tenor composer Flamand (Sebastian Kohlhepp) as they vie for the affections of the Countess.
The women in the cast – Byström, Dame Sarah Connolly as actor Clarion, who is being amorously pursued by the Count (Bo Skovhus), and Emma Morwood as the Italian Singer – were in their element, with baritone Skovhus an animated foil, his brother/sister dynamic with Byström in particular.
Of the male voices, Kohlhepp stood out, as did bass Peter Rose as a somewhat stolid La Roche, the theatre director trying to maintain control of the Countess’s birthday celebrations.
In the end, though, it was Byström’s show, singing the last scene entirely from memory, the music stands swept away for what is glorious music from the instrumentalists as well as the soprano, even if the verdict on the central question the opera poses is not unlike the fence-sitting “not proven” of Scots law.
Capriccio remains a deeply ambiguous work, easy to imagine as postmodern from a 21st-century perspective. It may contain implicit criticism of Nazi censorship, but equally remains frivolous and superficial for the dark years of its premiere. Without the raison d’etre of Davis, it did seem a slightly odd way to end the festival.
