Scottish Opera’s highlights tour, supported by Friends of Scottish Opera, will take place next year at 24 communities across the country, including Troon.
A tour with a new production hits the road from January 25 until March 22, with a show at Walker Hall in Troon on Tuesday, February 11 at 7m.
The cast will also travel to Cumbernauld, Kelso, Langholm, Clydebank, Tain, Fochabers, Midmar, Stranraer, Peebles, Mid Yell, Lerwick, Killin, Craignish, Strontian, Dunoon, Castlebay, Tarbert, Ullapool, Durness, Thurso, Campbeltown, Anstruther and Dundee.
Performing in this one-of-a-kind show, created specifically for Scottish Opera each season, are 2024/25 Emerging Artists – soprano Kira Kaplan, mezzo-soprano Chloe Harris and baritone Ross Cumming, currently seen by audiences in the Company’s five-star production of Britten’s Albert Herring.
They are joined by tenor Robert Forrest, making his Company debut. Accompanying the singers on piano is Music Director Joseph Beesley.
The director is Rebecca Meltzer, who last worked with Scottish Opera as Assistant Director on the award-winning production of Puccini’s ll trittico in 2023, and designs are by Kenneth MacLeod, who won the 2024 UK Theatre Award for Best Design for the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning.
The playlist cleverly combines a fabulous collection of much-loved classics with a treasure trove of lesser-known pieces. These include music from Beethoven’s Fidelio, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, Handel’s Ariodante, Rossini’s Les soirées musicales alongside an aria from Hamlet by French composer Ambroise Thomas.
This new production features longer excerpts of operas than in previous Opera Highlights productions, mainly sung in English or in an English translation.
These operatic snapshots are curated for the first time by Fiona MacSherry, Scottish Opera’s Head of Music.
In Rebecca Meltzer’s production they form vignettes taking place at the country’s many varied train stations, and these are places of greetings and goodbyes, reunions and setting off on new adventures, where all walks of life can coexist and interact equally.
Director Rebecca Meltzer said: “I’m thrilled to be presenting the next Opera Highlights tour which places Scottish heritage and culture at its heart.
“Through the course of the performance, we invite you to join us on a journey across Scotland, encountering the lives, loves and losses of an array of different characters. A range of exciting operatic extracts, the majority of which are performed in English, allow the audience to explore the breadth of human experience, as exhibited in the lives of those who come and go from the platform of one of Scotland’s many railway stations.”
While on tour with Opera Highlights, Scottish Opera is also running 11 school and four community workshops in Troon, Tain, Fochabers, Stranraer, Lerwick, Mid Yell, Oban, Castlebay, Tarbert, Ullapool, Thurso, Anstruther, and Dundee.
Entitled ‘How to stage an opera’, these free, interactive sessions are led by theatre-maker Flora Emily Thomson, and those attending will learn about the process of powerful storytelling through opera, using scenes from the Opera Highlights tour as inspiration.
Together with the show’s Music Director and two singers, Emily will explore how music can illustrate dramatic context on stage, and the mechanics of staging and directing scenes from an opera.
Participants can learn how singers use their voices and stage techniques to generate atmosphere and create mood to develop character, and how basic props can support the time, location and even the weather in which the story is unfolding.
These sessions are kindly supported by The McGlashan Charitable Trust and last approximately one hour.
They are open to all ages, and no previous experience is required.
Tickets for Scottish Opera’s Opera Highlights tour are now on sale here.
Details of ‘How to stage an opera’ sessions are available here.
Don’t miss the latest Ayrshire headlines –sign up to our free daily newsletter