Scottish Opera’s highlights tour comes to Durness in March 2025
Tickets are now on sale for the playful new production of Scottish Opera’s Opera Highlights, which comes to the north Highlands early next year.
The tour kicks off at Cumbernauld Theatre on January 25 and ends at Dundee on March 22. Along the way it will be visiting the Duthac Centre at Tain on Tuesday, January 4; the Macphail Centre in Ullapool on Tuesday, March 11; and Durness Village Hall on Thursday, March 13.
Performing in this one-of-a-kind show, created specifically for Scottish Opera each season, are 2024/25 emerging artists soprano Kira Kaplan, mezzo-soprano Chloe Harris and baritone Ross Cumming.They are joined by tenor Robert Forrest, making his Company debut. Accompanying the singers on piano is music director Joseph Beesley.
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, Scottish Opera’s 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, Scottish Opera is running 11 school and four community workshops including at Tain and Ullapool.
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.
The workshops will explore how music can illustrate dramatic context on stage, and the mechanics of staging and directing scenes from an opera. These sessions, lasting approximately one hour, are open to all ages, and no previous experience is required.
Tickets are on sale now at www.scottishopera.org.uk/shows/opera-highlights-2025/
Details of ‘How to stage an opera’ sessions are available at www.scottishopera.org.uk/shows/how-to-stage-an-opera/
