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."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article