Shock as Scottish Opera is reduced to just three shows
OperaScottish Opera has just admitted to its thinnest season since its foundation in 1962.
It consists of the UK premiere of Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London! along with revivals of La traviata and Barber of Seville.
That’s meagre. Is this the best an independent Scottish government can provide?
Read here.
It is thin but not new. For years Scottish Opera has shown just three main stage operas each season in Glasgow and Edinburgh, rarely elsewhere. The rest of the nation has extracts performed with piano. The company was punished for the losses incurred by its Ring cycle of 2003.
And not just the Ring cycle. It had required a considerable number of bailouts due to major over spending in the preceding 2 decades or so.
Why is this not a surprise?
Given the length of time the Scottish government – Not My Government, I hasten to add – have been in power, nothing they have done has shown them to have any clue as to the needs of the high arts and it’s performers and patrons, or even care for its existence north of the border, apart from the Edinburgh Festival. Mind you, I haven’t attended any performance given by Scottish Opera in years and judging by reports of their latest ruination of Bizet’s Carmen, I’m not missing anything.
If you’ve not attended in years, the more fool you! You’ve missed a lot of very fine performances. This season alone, the two operas preceding Carmen have been outstanding
This is desperate and it would seem financial problems are still seriously affecting this once proud and high-achieving company. As a recent book about the rise and fall of Scottish Opera’s Golden Years points out, in the early 1970s Scottish Opera was presenting over 100 performances of around 14 full operas each year with major artists like Janet Baker, Elizabeth Harwood Helga Dernesch, David Ward and Charles Craig in a touring situation (as the acquisition of the Theatre Royal was still a year or so in the future). More recently, David McVicar’s Trittico just a couple of months ago was a world class production and seemed to herald a return to former glory – although it must have been hugely expensive. The 2023/4 season can only be described as desperately sad.
It’s not an “independent Scottish government”; it’s a devolved administration covering a region of the UK with a population roughly equivalent to that of Yorkshire, which under its leadership of recent years, has consistently underfunded and undervalued any art that doesn’t fit a divisive and politicised nationalist agenda.
Scottish Opera does fine work with limited resources in a politically hostile environment, and deserves support. It also serves as a standing warning to those who’d undermine ENO in the same way.
They need the money for the ferries! That show seems to run and run.
If Scotland were independent it would have no Opera.