I have been attending performances by Scottish Opera for over 25 years, but for most of that time other people have been reviewing the shows for The Herald, and it is only in very recent months that the task has regularly fallen to me.
By what I can only consider further good fortune, the company has produced three very different and very fine works this year so far, each of which - the revival of James MacMillan's Ines de Castro, Ashley Page's staging of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and the current Jenufa, which has its final Glasgow performance tonight - is sufficiently far from the mainstream that commercial promoters like Raymond Gubbay and Ellen Kent also visit to be a clear justification for the subsidised sector. More to the point, they have also all been of very high quality and constitute a robust riposte to those who think that Scotland's national opera company is a poor use of the £8m of tax-payers' money it receives.
There is insufficient space in this entire Saturday section to rehearse the vexed history of the company as it has appeared on The Herald's news pages, often written by myself, over those 25 years. An attempt at a shotgun marriage of the orchestra with the BBC SSO, controversial bail-outs from the old Scottish Office, reams of expensive and un-actioned reports, seasons spent dark to save money, the abolition of whole portions (chorus, full time orchestra) of the company, much-delayed capital work on its property portfolio while the stage remains empty - it is some litany. Opera is an expensive business, but Scottish Opera has been condemned as a "self-perpetuating bureaucracy" that doesn't produce the goods to justify the administrative structure we are all supporting. Comparisons are often made, especially in the metropolitan press, with other "regional" opera companies, and specifically Opera North, and Scottish Opera is found wanting.
As it happens, the general director of Opera North Richard Mantle was seated behind me for this week's Jenufa premiere, and appeared to be enjoying the experience. His long tenure with the Leeds-based company is warmly regarded, but I can recall his briefer time as head of the Scottish company in the 1980s when he was much less popular. His is not the name most often mentioned when the work of Opera North is praised, however, rather than that of conductor Richard Farnes, who joined the company a decade after Mantle, in 1994. And there lies the real core of the problem that Scottish Opera's general director Alex Reedijk has to address. Since the resignation of Francesco Corti - still a regular visitor nonetheless, and conducting the Orchestra of Scottish Opera at St Andrew's in the Square, Glasgow, at the end of this month - Scottish Opera has lacked a music director. The "producer" model that has served audiences well over the first months of this year is not really a sustainable long-term option. No matter how good the mainstage shows are, and how fine the company's education and outreach work and small scale touring to Findhorn and Arisaig, the Scotland's national opera company has to have dynamic artistic leadership to be worthy of the name.
It appears to be a fairly open secret that Reedijk will soon announce that the man who is in the pit for Jenufa, Stuart Stratford, whose CV includes work at English National Opera and Opera North, will be the new music director at Scottish Opera. Expect much talk of poisoned chalices, but we should only welcome his appointment.With the company apparently on a sound footing financially, much of his role will be in re-making relationships with the rest of the musical life of Scotland, and making the music seem like value for money to the wider public. That is still a big sell.
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