Opera Scotland

Platée 1997Royal Opera

Read more about the opera Platée

This proved a great success at the 1997 Edinburgh Festival. Rameau's operas were becoming better known down south, largely due to years of effort by Lina Lalandi and the English Bach Festival. However, in Scotland they were still almost entirely unknown, and this was the Scottish premiere of Platée.

The extended closure of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, to allow for its spectacular redevelopment, had the benefit for Scottish audiences of making its resident company available to visit the Edinburgh Festival Theatre for the 1997 and 1998 Festivals. During the post-war years, the Covent Garden Opera had made annual tours to the major British 'provincial' cities - a phase that culminated in a visit to the 1961 Edinburgh Festival, using the much smaller King's Theatre. The domestic touring then stopped apart from two brief visits to Manchester in the eighties.

 Mark Morris already had a high reputation for arranging dances to great music by baroque composers, including Bach, Purcell and Handel. Inevitably, Jean-Paul Fouchécourt stole every scene in his wonderful green frog outfit complete with handbag and pearls.