Scottish Opera’s occasional opera-in-concert series has been a great platform for works that will never see a main-stage production and here it proved to be so again. This one-off performance was a double bill of one-act operas based on works by Pushkin, apparently a remnant of a Russian opera in concert series that was mothballed by Covid.
For all that this might seem an inopportune moment for Russian opera, the composers Rachmaninov and Stravinsky, both with links to Ukraine, were themselves no strangers to exile and loss. Only Rachmaninov’s work, The Miserly Knight, was written for Russia. Premiered in Moscow in 1906 – and here receiving a very belated Scottish premiere – this is a dark tale of an English baron obsessed with hoarding his wealth and controlling his son through the purse strings while external forces try to manipulate the family dynamic, leading almost inevitably to patricide.
