Opera Scotland

Manon 2001English Touring Opera

Read more about the opera Manon

After several years of mounting its own productions of operas by Mozart, Gluck and Britten, officials of the Ferth Festival decided the costs were no longer tenable. The best possible result came out of this, in that someone realised that English Touring Opera's spring season was reaching its climax at just the right time, their productions were of the right scale for Perth's theatre, and they had not until then worked in Scotland. An agreement was reached so that for the next decade and more ETO would bring two operas to play before two or three packed houses.

The first year brought The Magic Flute, a work seen frequently in recent years, but it opened with a most unusual work, in Massenet's Manon, not seen in Scotland for nearly half a century. The staging was a remarkably effective and economical one, given that this work was generally considered rather a complicated and expensive piece to stage.