THAT Dunbar Parish Church still stands sentinel over the East Lothian town is testament to the determination of the congregation, after it was gutted by fire 30 years ago. Even now it is surrounded by scaffolding and plastic sheeting as part of an external refurbishment of stonework and stained glass due to be completed by the end of the year. The storm that swept the country last week made the building site a treacherous prospect, restricting rehearsal time for the performance of a new community opera commissioned by the Lammermuir Festival from composer Matthew Rooke.
The Scottish Opera truck parked outside for last Saturday’s show was not similarly camouflaged behind a scrim net and fake foliage, but it was sort of undercover, in contrast to its gig the previous evening a few miles down the road at St Mary’s in Haddington. While Friday’s staging of Britten rarity The Burning Fiery Furnace was a Scottish Opera presentation, funded by the Scottish Government as one of our national companies, Saturday’s premiere had been made possible, as co-director of the Lammermuir Festival James Waters was careful to credit before the show, through the good offices of Creative Scotland. It wasn’t just the lorry that Scottish opera-goers may have recognised, however. The musicians on stage – playing alongside youngsters from the Dunbar area – were the Orchestra of Music Co-OPERAtive Scotland (aka McOpera) which came into being when the players of the Orchestra of Scottish Opera were put on part-time contracts as a cash-saving measure. The producer of the show was horn player Sue Baxendale and the leader was Katie Hull, both driving forces behind the McOpera initiative and members of the opera company’s pit band.
Baxendale’s remit is education and outreach and Rooke’s opera, An Cadal Trom, was a stellar example of that, with singers young and old from schools and choirs in the area combining with the instrumentalist to spin a terrific yarn – or sequence of tales, like A Thousand and One Nights – with professional singers Andrew McTaggart and Penelope Cousland putting in a full shift to lead them through it all. Others who had drilled the community groups and were brought forward for a curtain call were, beyond doubt, just the tip of a vast iceberg of community effort behind making such a success of Rooke’s fine piece (and that’s an Arctic metaphor I have also borrowed from Waters).
Of course that work should be foregrounded in all praise of the production, but there is also something slightly odd about the division between the musicians who played at St Mary’s and those in Dunbar, and the technical support in both places. Clearly some of Scottish Opera’s resources trickled a little way down the road to support the musicians who, on another day, would be playing Pagliacci in a tent in Paisley or Rigoletto in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal. Yet the fractured funding structure of the arts in Scotland has produced a situation where the national opera company cannot afford a full-time orchestra and Creative Scotland, the national arts funding body, cannot be seen to be supporting a directly-funded national company. In a country the size of Scotland, where there is no arts company big or small wallowing in the level of funding enjoyed by similar organisations elsewhere in Europe, this seems just a bit, well, daft.
On this occasion, it may all have worked out for the best with good will on all sides, but it reminds me of the sort of nonsense about cross-border touring that restricted what audiences could see of work funded by the Arts Council of England, rather than the Scottish Arts Council, in the years when Dunbar’s kirk was newly restored. Composer Matthew Rooke, who had returned to the UK from his studies in the US and the Caribbean to be head of music at the SAC in the 1990s, will also remember the frustration that caused. The absurdities of silo-mindedness are, like the poor, always with us.
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