Sir Thomas Allen’s crowd-pleasing Magic Flute returns to Scottish Opera in a finely sung performance with Tobias Ringborg drawing period colours from the orchestra.
Climate change, challenged egos and a strange Ice woman tell a gruesome tale in Anthropocene, a finely sung new opera from Stuart MacRae, with libretto from Louise Welsh, set in the Arctic with a cinematic score.
More relevant than ever, the patriarchal nightmare of Verdi's Rigoletto is dark and unflinching in Scottish Opera's revival of their 2011 production, with some striking scenes and fine singing.
Director Oliver Mears turns Scottish Opera’s Eugene Onegin into a memory play, with fine singing from a strong cast starring Natalya Romaniv as a thrilling Tatyana.
Alex Otterburn as East End Eddy gives a towering performance in Scottish Opera’s revival of its Edinburgh Festival production of Mark Anthony Turnage’s Greek.
Scottish Opera and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland with an international cast pack a huge punch in a concert performance of Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel.
There are no answers, nor indeed many probing questions, in this Scottish Opera revival of Sir David McVicar’s production from 2008, but it is sumptuous and enjoyable.
Karen Cargill returns to Scottish Opera as Judith in Bluebeard’s Castle in a double bill with The 8th Door, a new opera from Lliam Paterson and Vanishing Point’s Matthew Lenton.
Scottish Opera’s production of Philip Glass and Christopher Hampton's The Trial says less about Kafka’s vision of an absurd world and more about the absurdity of contemporary operatic conventions.
Scottish Opera’s boutique touring production of The Elixir of Love is a fun-filled delight. Fine singing, perfect comic timing, all to a score for just five players. It worked a treat.
Martin Lloyd Evans returns to Scottish Opera direct a visually rich and lively Mikado. Richard Suart is a veteran Ko-Ko with no-one safe from his Little List as it changes for every performance.
Intelligently staged and brilliantly sung, Scottish Opera can be justly proud of their new production of Ariodante. It is all about the oranges really.
The Devil Inside, a chilling new opera by Stuart Macrae with libretto by Louise Welsh, is a fairy tale for grown-ups. Who will be the last owner of the devilish bottle and the curse of eternal damnation?
Justina Gringyte is a fabulous Carmen in Scottish Opera's dark take on this most tuneful of operas. Large choruses, including children with cigarettes, and a strong supporting cast make this an enjoyable show.
Scottish Opera's Il trovatore has a uniformly strong cast and shorus who sing finely, conducted by Tobias Ringwood producing spectacular sounds from the orchestra. A wonderful end to the season.
Scottish Opera revives Sir David McVicar's Madama Butterfly. It still looks wonderful. The music, players and singers tell the harrowing story magnificently.
The most Scottish of operas, Verdi's Macbeth, makes big demands on its soloists and is packed with choruses, so it was interesting to see how Scottish Opera's production managed with only seven singers and a chamber orchestra.
Big opera productions capture the limelight, but there is no denying the impact of Scottish Opera arriving in tiny communities with this entertaining show of staged operatic excerpts.
Scottish Opera Orchestra and Royal Conservatiore of Scotland showcase singers trained and training in Scotland, tackling repertoire influenced by Sir Walter Scott.
A year of theatre refurbishment leaves Scottish Opera with only three and half full productions this season, so the spotlight turned firmly onto this Don Giovanni from director Sir Thomas Allen, designer Simon Higlett and lighting designer Mark Jonathan.
Scottish Opera made a wise choice in selecting Handel’s concise court drama to tour widely across Scotland this autumn. This is the ideal showcase for its Emerging Artist singers and also the new faces in the production team.
In his programme note, director John Fulljames remarked that “any opera has many layers of authorship”, and that is truer of American Lulu than most.Alban Berg compiled the original libretto for Lulu (1929–34) from two plays by Frank Wedekind: Erdgreist (“Earth Spirit”, 1895) and Die Büsche der Pandora (“Pandora’s Box”, 1904).
To end the 2012/13 season, Scottish Opera has teamed up with the D’Oyly Carte Company to create a crisp new production of The Pirates of Penzance, which heads off to England and Wales after touring Scotland.
In Harry Fehr’s much-anticipated new production of The Flying Dutchman for Scottish Opera, the setting is in Scotland – as Wagner had originally intended before a last-minute switch to Norway during rehearsals for the first production in 1843.
The world of opera can sometimes be hard for the newcomer to love as there are often fiendishly complicated and frequently unbelievable plots to get to grips with. Jules Massenet’s opera Werther is happily none of these: it is a straightforward story of unrequited love.
Audiences have come to look forward to the annual co-production between Scottish Opera and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where student opera singers, orchestra players and backstage crew get a chance to partner up with their professionals across the other side of Glasgow’s Hope Street.
We see so many images of war and fighting on the televisions in our living rooms daily that we can almost become acclimatised to shocking violence. Yet within living memory our main cities in Britain were a different world of fear, soldiers, bombs and destruction.
It is always a challenge to take live opera to the places opera does not reach, and let’s face it, many people live a distance from the main performing venues. A long drive home after a three-hour opera or an overnight stay in the city weeds out all but the dedicated followers.
Following acclaimed productions at Scottish Opera of The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville, recently revived, Thomas Allen returns to Glasgow to direct The Magic Flute.
Scottish Opera’s final production of the season was a revival of the much-loved 1980 production of Tosca by the late Anthony Besch, redirected here by Jonathan Cocker. Besch was struck by the political parallel between the Napoleonic era of the 1800s and Italy under Mussolini in the 1940s, and he made the bold choice to set this production in 1943.
Paradox is unsurprising in the works of a composer who said: "The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit." The often distancing neoclassical idiom seemed unable to deny Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951) emotionally engaging and affecting music.
It has become customary to give recent productions of Hänsel and Gretel a modern and often murkier twist, perhaps mirroring the current surge in popularity of darker stories, and the appetite for Nordic noir in particular.
Scottish Opera and Northern Ireland Opera's new version of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld has been touring Scotalnd and Northern Ireland: it's now arrived in London for a short run at the Young Vic in London, in its 150-seater Maria hall alongside the main theatre.
