In Scotland, as elsewhere throughout the UK, opera is enjoying unprecedented audiences and attention, due largely to performances on television and well publicised commercial recordings of the classics.

There are a variety of companies - professional, semi-professional, academic, and amateur - who perform regularly throughout the country. Such performances can range from large-scale productions of grand operas such as The Ring Cycle down to programmes of operatic highlights performed by only a handful of singers and musicians. This latter type of performance has done much to popularise opera in the last decade, as have the emergence of companies whose ethos is to make high-quality performances accessible to as wide an audience as possible.