Opera Scotland

Golden Cockerel 1979Scottish Opera

Read more about the opera Golden Cockerel

The 1979 Festival featured operas from two British companies. Kent Opera made their only visit, following their successful incursion to Stirling with Orfeo. They provided excellent stagings of Verdi (La traviata) and Gluck (Iphigenia in Tauris). Scottish Opera produced their first staging of Eugene Onegin, as well as revivals of two of their very best productions, The Golden Cockerel and The Turn of the Screw.

David Pountney's wonderfully colourful staging thoroughly deserved its exposure to the Festival audience along with the new Onegin (also directed by Pountney) and a further revival of Turn of the Screw, featuring a brief final appearance by Peter Pears in the Prologue. Henry Lewis was an excellent new conductor, while the cast was largely familiar, led by John Winfield's wonderfully eerie Astrologer and Bill McCue's genial king.