This year's centenary of the quintessentially English composer Benjamin Britten will be celebrated in a most unlikely location, when a small Highland community launches Scotland's newest opera company.

Cromarty Youth Opera will stage its first performance next week, and it will be Britten's Noye's Fludde, or Noah's Flood.

The group has the support of no less a figure than the celebrated Scottish classical composer and conductor James MacMillan, who is its patron. It is hoped he will manage to attend.

It all began when Edward Caswell and family moved to Cromarty a year ago.

An international choral conductor, he has been chorus master of the Philharmonia Chorus in London and works with the Netherlands Radio Choir and the North German Radio Choir, rubbing creative shoulders with conductors such as Bernard Haitink.

A regular collaborator of MacMillan's, he has worked at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (formerly RSAMD) and Glasgow University. But his new home, at the north-eastern tip of the Black Isle, has fewer than 800 residents. Rather then being an opera hotspot, it is best known as the birthplace of the 19th-century polymath Hugh Miller.

Mr Caswell said: "This is Britten's centenary year so it is the perfect time to do it. I had been in the opera singing the part of Noah years ago, so I wanted to conduct it.

"But more importantly I wanted to introduce as many new Cromarty children as possible to opera."

Applications for financial support to the local Middleton Trust and Creative Scotland proved successful and Cromarty Youth Opera was founded.

Mr Caswell started recruiting at Cromarty Primary, Fortrose Academy, and other schools on the Black Isle. Open to children and young people from six to 24, the company now has 30 singers. Local adults and children make up the orchestra.

The part of Noah will be sung by Andy McTaggart who is on the Emerging Artists Scheme at Scottish Opera. But just as important to the project are singers such as Joseph Stewart, eight, and Coll Fullerton, nine, who have just finished Primary Four.

Joseph said it was when Edward was taking a workshop in his school that he had become interested.

Coll said: "I just like ­singing so I thought I would come along.

"But I found it a bit surprising becausethe singing is so loud, which is good."

Another singer is Talitha, Mr Caswell's 12-year-old daughter, who is just about to go to Fortrose Academy.

She said: "I have done a lot of singing in school choirs. I was in Netherlee Primary's choir when we lived in ­Glasgow, and I am in the Highland Youth Choir. But this is different."

Her mother Clare is the company manager. There will be three performances next week in Cromarty's West Church.

The venue is important to Mr Caswell. He said: "Britten did write this piece to be performed in a church in a small seaside community, Orford in Suffolk. Now we are performing it in a church in a tiny seaside community. So there is a nice link with the children of Orford who first performed it in 1958."

And, he says: "We are determined this will be the first of many projects for Cromarty Youth Opera."