With four new main-stage events, four concert performances, and a Mozart revival, a Mozart revival, Scottish Opera’s forthcoming season harks back just enough to whet the appetite and bring back memories of the company’s brave ambitions in the early 1960s.
The new Pelleas and Melisande from Sir David McVicar, with the long-awaited new music director Stuart Stratford as conductor, sets the tone. No work is more redolent of Scottish Opera’s original hopes and designs than Debussy’s masterpiece, staged by the newborn company along with Madama Butterfly at a time when the Scottish National Orchestra was free to play in the pit of the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, and the performance was the most revelatory operatic event in Britain that year.
A new production created by someone of the calibre of McVicar bodes well, and we must cross our fingers that it will bring back a touch of the old magic that existed here in Scotland 54 years ago, when the founding of the company was the highest aspiration in Scottish musical memory.
Though the new Pelleas will not be staged at the Edinburgh Festival - though there is certainly space for it - its performances in Glasgow and Edinburgh next February will be something to look forward to.
A new production of La Boheme by Renaud Doucet inspired by the Parisian jazz age of Josephine Baker, a co-production of Bluebeard’s Castle with a new piece of music theatre, The Eighth Door, by Scottish Opera’s composer-in-residence Liam Paterson, and another co-production - with Music Theatre Wales, Covent Garden, and the Magdeburg Theatre - of Philip Glass’s opera based on Kafka’s The trial are the other highlights.
A small-scale touring production of Donizetti’s Elisir d’Amore, updated to the time of PG Wodehouse, will travel from Stornoway to Newton Stewart, and the Mozart revival, which opens at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, in October, is of Sir Thomas Allen’s racy version of The Marriage of Figaro with Anna Devlin as Susanna and Eleanor Dennis as the Countess.
The concert performances, all at the Theatre Royal, are to be ”curated” - Scottish Opera’s word - by music director Stuart Stratford with a Debussy rarity, L’Enfant Prodigue, and Puccini’s equally uncommon Le Villi as links with the main season. Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz and Rossini’s La Scala di Seta are the other works, with the Scottish Opera Orchestra accompanying every performance.
So, better or worse? Much better by the look of things. Indeed, if the performances prove fine enough, it will be an inspirational, and very interesting, season.
18 May 2016
The new Pelleas and Melisande from Sir David McVicar, with the long-awaited new music director Stuart Stratford as conductor, sets the tone. No work is more redolent of Scottish Opera’s original hopes and designs than Debussy’s masterpiece, staged by the newborn company along with Madama Butterfly at a time when the Scottish National Orchestra was free to play in the pit of the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, and the performance was the most revelatory operatic event in Britain that year.
A new production created by someone of the calibre of McVicar bodes well, and we must cross our fingers that it will bring back a touch of the old magic that existed here in Scotland 54 years ago, when the founding of the company was the highest aspiration in Scottish musical memory.
Though the new Pelleas will not be staged at the Edinburgh Festival - though there is certainly space for it - its performances in Glasgow and Edinburgh next February will be something to look forward to.
A new production of La Boheme by Renaud Doucet inspired by the Parisian jazz age of Josephine Baker, a co-production of Bluebeard’s Castle with a new piece of music theatre, The Eighth Door, by Scottish Opera’s composer-in-residence Liam Paterson, and another co-production - with Music Theatre Wales, Covent Garden, and the Magdeburg Theatre - of Philip Glass’s opera based on Kafka’s The trial are the other highlights.
A small-scale touring production of Donizetti’s Elisir d’Amore, updated to the time of PG Wodehouse, will travel from Stornoway to Newton Stewart, and the Mozart revival, which opens at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, in October, is of Sir Thomas Allen’s racy version of The Marriage of Figaro with Anna Devlin as Susanna and Eleanor Dennis as the Countess.
The concert performances, all at the Theatre Royal, are to be ”curated” - Scottish Opera’s word - by music director Stuart Stratford with a Debussy rarity, L’Enfant Prodigue, and Puccini’s equally uncommon Le Villi as links with the main season. Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz and Rossini’s La Scala di Seta are the other works, with the Scottish Opera Orchestra accompanying every performance.
So, better or worse? Much better by the look of things. Indeed, if the performances prove fine enough, it will be an inspirational, and very interesting, season.
18 May 2016
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