A total (and often gripping) theatrical experience: Scottish Opera’s Ainadamar reviewed

Do you remember Osvaldo Golijov? Two decades ago he was classical music’s Next Big Thing: a credible postmodernist with a lush and listenable tonal flair, and an Argentinian with an interestingly complex European heritage in a millennium where everyone agreed – for a while, anyway – that the future was Latin American. Major labels recorded his music as soon as it was premièred; he was popular. Too popular for some – I remember a contemporary music promoter lamenting, with the demeanour of a housemaster who’s just found the head boy smoking behind the bins, that Golijov ‘hadn’t developed as we’d hoped’. Anyhow, Golijov was big, and then something stalled. Commissions failed to materialise, there were rumours of creative block, and the parade moved on.

So here we are in 2022, finally witnessing the ‘Scottish première and first staged UK production’ of Golijov’s 2003 opera Ainadamar. Note those qualifications: Ainadamar was snapped up for a UK première towards the peak of Goli-mania in 2008 (not in a theatre, but by the CBSO in Birmingham) and it hasn’t been seen here since.