Scottish Opera’s announcement of its 2015-16 season - proclaimed from the company’s flamboyant new annexe in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal - has brought with it, among some good things, the familiar whiff of expedience, cutback, and cheese-paring.
Handel’s Ariodante, it’s true, is one of his greatest and most poignant operas, brought to the Edinburgh Festival by the Piccola Scala company with a glorious array of counter-tenors many years ago. The new production, from the team that recently gave us Orlando, certainly looks promising.
A new Scottish work shared with Music Theatre Wales - Stuart MacRae’s The Devil Inside, with a libretto by Louise Welsh based on a supernatural story by Robert Louis Stevenson - also looks like good news. But a pocket production of Cosi Fan Tutte, destined to tour the Highlands and Lowlands, and co-productions of The Mikado (in conjunction with the D’Oyly Carte), Dvorak’s Rusalka (snared with Grange Park Opera) and Bizet’s Carmen (with Welsh National) make originality seem like a lost cause.
Coming from a company that once staged Cosi with Janet Baker, the small-scale touring production of Mozart’s masterpiece sounds like utilitarian padding - or what Lord Harewood used to describe as spending money to save money. Dvorak’s mermaid opera is a lovely piece, but should the company’s new music director Stuart Stratford be making his debut with an imported production of it?
As for Carmen, it is being done everywhere at the moment, a sure sign that playing safe is prevalent in Britain at present.
Is this really the sort of unadventurous programming that the SNP should feel proud to preside over? With every year that passes, Scottish Opera as we used to know it seems further and further away.
21 May 2015
Handel’s Ariodante, it’s true, is one of his greatest and most poignant operas, brought to the Edinburgh Festival by the Piccola Scala company with a glorious array of counter-tenors many years ago. The new production, from the team that recently gave us Orlando, certainly looks promising.
A new Scottish work shared with Music Theatre Wales - Stuart MacRae’s The Devil Inside, with a libretto by Louise Welsh based on a supernatural story by Robert Louis Stevenson - also looks like good news. But a pocket production of Cosi Fan Tutte, destined to tour the Highlands and Lowlands, and co-productions of The Mikado (in conjunction with the D’Oyly Carte), Dvorak’s Rusalka (snared with Grange Park Opera) and Bizet’s Carmen (with Welsh National) make originality seem like a lost cause.
Coming from a company that once staged Cosi with Janet Baker, the small-scale touring production of Mozart’s masterpiece sounds like utilitarian padding - or what Lord Harewood used to describe as spending money to save money. Dvorak’s mermaid opera is a lovely piece, but should the company’s new music director Stuart Stratford be making his debut with an imported production of it?
As for Carmen, it is being done everywhere at the moment, a sure sign that playing safe is prevalent in Britain at present.
Is this really the sort of unadventurous programming that the SNP should feel proud to preside over? With every year that passes, Scottish Opera as we used to know it seems further and further away.
21 May 2015
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