Elijah 2013Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Read more about the opera Elijah
This pair of performances of Mendelssohn's final masterpiece was notable for a number of features - Lisa Milne was now rarely seen in performance on home ground, and Barry Banks was also more often seen on foreign territory. Catherine Wyn-Rogers was a more regular visitor, Hanno Müller-Brachmann was a complete novelty in the title role.
As for Sir Andrew Davis, this famous maestro conducted the SNO regularly in his youth, and even played the harpsichord at Ledlanet. More recently his visits to Scotland have been for Festival performances, but the erstwhile head of Glyndebourne and current director of Chicago's Lyric Opera has done little opera here to this point - a situation happily to be rectified by a series of concert performances with the RSNO at subsequent Edinburgh Festivals.
The most unusual feature, however, is that the performance was sung, at the conductor's insistance, in the original German, so it should really have been called Elias. Not even the stellar Edinburgh Festival cast of 1996 did that.
