Tickets are now on sale for our playful new production of Opera Highlights, which explores and celebrates Scotland’s rich landscape. It hits the road from 25 January until 22 March, visiting 24 communities across the country.
Performing in this one-of-a-kind show, created specifically for us each season, are 2024/25 Emerging Artists soprano Kira Kaplan, mezzo-soprano Chloe Harris and baritone Ross Cumming, currently seen by audiences in our five-star production of Britten’s Albert Herring. They are joined by tenor Robert Forrest, making his debut with us. Accompanying the singers on piano is Music Director Joseph Beesley.
The cast travels to Cumbernauld, Kelso, Langholm, Clydebank, Tain, Fochabers, Midmar, Troon, Stranraer, Peebles, Mid Yell, Lerwick, Killin, Craignish, Strontian, Dunoon, Castlebay, Tarbert, Ullapool, Durness, Thurso, Campbeltown, Anstruther, and Dundee.
The director is Rebecca Meltzer, who last worked with us as Assistant Director on the award-winning production of Puccini’s ll trittico in 2023, and designs are by Kenneth MacLeod, who won the 2024 UK Theatre Award for Best Design for the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning.
The playlist cleverly combines a fabulous collection of much-loved classics with a treasure trove of lesser-known pieces. These include music from Beethoven’s Fidelio, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, Handel’s Ariodante, Rossini’s Les soirées musicales alongside an aria from Hamlet by French composer Ambroise Thomas.
This production features longer excerpts of operas than in previous Opera Highlights productions, mainly sung in English or in an English translation. These operatic snapshots are curated for the first time by Fiona MacSherry, our Head of Music. In Rebecca Meltzer’s production they form vignettes taking place at the country’s many varied train stations, and these are places of greetings and goodbyes, reunions and setting off on new adventures, where all walks of life can coexist and interact equally.
While on tour with Opera Highlights, we are running 11 school and four community workshops in Tain, Fochabers, Troon, Stranraer, Lerwick, Mid Yell, Oban, Castlebay, Tarbert, Ullapool, Thurso, Anstruther, and Dundee.
Entitled ‘How to Stage an Opera’, these free, interactive sessions are led by theatre-maker Flora Emily Thomson, and those attending will learn about the process of powerful storytelling through opera, using scenes from the Opera Highlights tour as inspiration.
Opera Highlights is kindly supported by Friends of Scottish Opera.
For more details and tickets visit www.scottishopera.org.uk/shows/opera-highlights-2025/