Opera Scotland

Love for Three Oranges 1962Belgrade Opera

Read more about the opera Love for Three Oranges

As part of the Edinburgh International Festival, the company from Belgrade were imported to fill a gap in the repertoire - Russian opera had hitherto been ignored, and the Yugoslavs provided the closest to an authentic slavonic sound that we were likely to hear, even if some of the singers had a tendency to perform in Serbo-Croat. The other opera at the Festival was presented by the English Opera Group - a new staging of Britten’s tense little masterpiece, The Turn of the Screw, with two of the original cast from 1954, Peter Pears and Jennifer Vyvyan, still in the roles they created.

The repertoire the Yugoslavs brought was wonderfully unusual and enterprising. The Russian rarities were Musorgsky's Khovanshchina, Borodin's Prince Igor and Prokofiev's Gambler and Love for Three Oranges, both receiving British premieres. The non-Russian rarity was Massenet's Don Quichotte.

These performances prompted Sadler's Wells to mount the first British production of Love for Three Oranges shortly afterwards, and it stayed in the repertoire well into the seventies, though it never toured.

Cast details are from a copy of the programme in the OperaScotland collection.

How should the title be translated? The Edinburgh International Festival of the day called it  'Love of Three Oranges', which seems a less accurate rendering of the French.