All About Scotland

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.

Scottish Opera

Scottish Opera is Scotland’s national opera company and the largest performing arts organisation in Scotland. It was founded by Sir Alexander Gibson in 1962 and was inaugurated with a production of Madama Butterfly at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow. In 1974 Scottish Opera purchased the Theatre Royal Glasgow, which reopened in 1975 as Scotland’s first national opera house. The Orchestra of Scottish Opera was founded in 1980.

Notable achievements include the world premiere of James MacMillan's Ines de Castro at the 1996 Edinburgh International Festival and Wagner's complete Ring Cycles at the 2003 Edinburgh International Festival, which won the 2004 South Bank Show Award for Best Opera Production. Recent commissions include Five:15 Operas Made in Scotland, part of a five-year research and development project to find the next generation of opera-makers, composers and librettists.

Scottish Opera is committed to bringing the widest possible range of opera, performed to the highest possible standards, to the maximum audience throughout Scotland and the UK; each year it performs in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Inverness and over 50 other theatres, village halls and community centres. It also operate an extensive programme of outreach and education work which involves over 12,000 primary school children a year, as well as many other activities including adult learning and Unwrapped taster sessions.

Scottish Opera’s income is derived from public subsidy, box office and private and commercial support. It is funded by the Scottish Government.

Image: Scottish Opera's La Traviata - courtesy of Drew Farrell