Opera Scotland

Letters of a Love Betrayed 2009Music Theatre Wales

Read more about the opera Letters of a Love Betrayed

Music Theatre Wales had been performing a wide range of twentieth century chamber operas, including new work, for a number of years, without ever coming to Scotland, and this first visit was arranged as a collaboration with Scottish Opera.

This fluent new piece, using a pit band similar in composition to that employed by Britten in his chamber operas, was an excellent work for the company to use to introduce itself to Scottish audiences.

It was also pleasing to see that the performance was a sell-out at the Traverse, a venue not noted for its operatic output. It was received with deserved enthusiasm, by a thoroughly attentive audience.

It was already known that the company was to return in 2010 with Philip Glass's In the Penal Colony, with the intention that a regular relationship with Scottish Opera and the Traverse could develop.

Programme context

Scottish Opera's 2009/10 season contained four full main-stage productions plus one small-scale tour. The two works the company had never touched before were the young Rossini's frothy Italian Girl in Algiers and Leoš Janáček'a Adventures of Mr Brouček. The two revivals were an ultra-traditional Elisir d'amore and an ultra-modern Bohème. There was also a piano-accompanied tour of a second Janáček piece, Kátya Kabanová.

There were some additional elements, however, including a third programme of new short chamber pieces under the 5:15 umbrella.

There was also a 'Scenes & Arias' tour by four young singers and a pianist, the old Essential Scottish Opera format now revised as Opera Highlights. There was a new 'Interactive Opera for 3 to 6 Year Olds', entitled Auntie Janet Saves The Planet.

Two well-contrasted co-productions also featured. Music Theatre Wales brought a new chamber piece by Eleanor Alberga, Letters of a Love Betrayed, while the RSAMD joined forces with the orchestra and technical staff of Scottish Opera to mount the Scottish premiere of Prokofiev's wonderful Tolstoy adaptation War and Peace.