Opera Scotland

Fliegende Holländer 1987Scottish Opera

Read more about the opera Flying Dutchman

This excellent staging by John Cox was Scottish Opera’s first ever production of the earliest of Wagner’s music dramas to remain in regular performance. It was also Cox's debut as a director of Wagner. The production was shared with Washington, and after it travelled across the Atlantic it never returned, which was a great pity.

It was performed in one act, and the set was cleverly designed to cope with the necessary changes without intervention by curtains. The cast was uniformly excellent, and the chorus danced as well as they sang - no mean feat when the hydraulically-operated deck took on some odd angles from time to time - some very rough seas in the fjord. Norman Bailey's peerless interpretation was superb, as expected, but he and Gibson also drew excellent contributions from the others.