Opera Scotland

Orfeo ed Euridice 1994Scottish Opera-Go-Round

Read more about the opera Orpheus and Euridice

With hindsight, this was a fascinating Opera-Go-Round production. It started off in the autumn of 1993 with fifteen performances, piano only, before going out on the road with a small orchestra for a further ten the following spring. Perhaps surprisingly, Orfeo had not been done in this way by the company before, and the extensive tour was considered a success. The original simpler Viennese version worked well. The orchestra was cut to eleven players, who gave a good account of the score once they settled. The chorus was treated perhaps more radically - four singers, one for each part, who also performed the dances. They were Talitha Theobald, Claire Bradshaw, Nicholas Hurndall Smith and Christopher Parke.

The tour was notable for three features. The young conductor Harry Bicket, completely unknown in Scotland, turned out to be impressive, with an instinctive sense of the style for playing this difficult baroque masterpiece. Lisa Milne, still a student, showed from her first phrases that she was an outstanding talent. And young choreographer Wayne McGregor made an impression, and succeeded in getting the four singers who sang the choruses to dance naturally as well. The set was novel - a group of white flattened hoops on their sides - likened by some to a dinosaur graveyard, and by one critic to the remains of a plate of osso buco. It was all rather ugly, as were the costumes - a bit too plastic-looking.

A curious footnote to this event is the fact that a quarter century later, in 2019, Harry Bicket and Wayne McGregor, both now well established in their international careers, worked respectively as Conductor and Director of a staging of Orfeo by ENO at the London Coliseum.