RSNO & Ellie Storach: Uprising, Edinburgh review: 'spine-tingling'

RSNO & Ellie Storach: Uprising, Usher Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★★

It’s a measure of how quickly we’ve slid backwards in recent months that composer Jonathan Dove and librettist April De Angelis’s 2023 climate change community opera Uprising already feels like something of a period piece. But that’s not to diminish the opera’s power or sophistication, nor its message of hope, especially as when delivered so eloquently, so movingly, and with such musical and theatrical ingenuity as they were in the RSNO’s lavish, Usher Hall stage-filling account.

The RSNO perform Uprising | Image courtesy of the RSNO

It might have been billed as a concert performance, but director Sinéad O’Neill ensured it was far more than that, with the massed ranks of the RSNO Chorus and Youth Chorus embodying sky-reaching trees or dangerously surging rivers, and her six-strong main cast thoroughly filling their roles with costumes and movement.

Ffion Edwards was intense and focused as Scottish school climate striker Lola, with a glorious, nimble, silvery soprano that went skyrocketing on occasion to spine-tingling effect. Madeleine Shaw captured the conflicted motivations of her forest-felling, superhighway-building businesswoman of a mother excellently, and though he had less to play with, Marcus Farnsworth was vivid and tender as her father. But Dove and De Angelis had devised many additional smaller roles for stand-out chorus singers, delivered very persuasively, and a seven-strong battery of community drummers, headed by professional Stuart Semple, added enormous vigour and heft to scenes of protest.

Indeed, Dove’s music was as viscerally powerful as it was clever: he grounded his language deep in music’s natural resonances, but wasn’t afraid to throw in a bit of jazz, a bit of Stravinsky and quite a lot of John Adams, though the brisk, deftly scored style was distinctively his own, played with vigour and masses of character by a top-form RSNO under Ellie Storach’s crisp, precise direction.

Logistically, Uprising was a major achievement. Artistically it was a huge success in its blend of professionals and amateurs. Ultimately, though, it was the opera’s message of hope and youthful power that really moved.

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