Opera Scotland

Fledermaus 2007Scottish Opera

Read more about the opera Fledermaus

The 2006/07 season of Scottish Opera showed the company gradually recovering from the disastrous financial collapse that had led to the shut-down in 2005. The Edinburgh Festival featured a new work by Stuart MacRae and Simon Armitage called The Assassin Tree. This was a co-production with Covent Garden. The season proper consisted of four full scale productions. The new staging in the autumn was Handel's Tamerlano, with Lucia di Lammermoor in the spring. The two revivals were of successful McVicar stagings - Der Rosenkavalier in the autumn, with Madama Butterfly to follow. A small-scale tour saw a first attempt at producing Viennese operetta in this manner. Die Fledermaus had a nineteen-stop tour with piano accompaniment in the autumn, to be followed in April by ten performances with small orchestra. The spring also saw the regular tour of operatic scenes and arias - Essential Scottish Opera.

The Strauss music undoubtedly comes over more agreeably in this presentation for a small orchestra of Scottish Opera principals than in the bare bones of the piano reduction heard in the autumn. The cast remained as accomplished as before, with just one change (Falke) from the first run.