Opera Scotland

Aïda 2009Ellen Kent Productions

Read more about the opera Aïda

Spring 2009 was announced as the Farewell Tour for Ellen Kent's operation, a venture that had successfully toured popular productions of staple repertoire operas around the country for around fifteen years.

The company was called Ellen Kent Amphitheatre Productions, and the feature that dominated the tour was a unit set used for each of the operas in the repertoire. As the title suggests, this was an amphitheatre that filled the stage and may have looked impressive as a reminder of the Coliseum for Tosca, or as a bullring for Carmen. For Aïda a few black statues of Anubis were slotted into alcoves, but didn't really succeed in evoking Egypt. For other operas it was still less appropriate. It also interfered with the natural acoustic of an auditorium. In some venues this may have been a good thing, but in others it seems to have introduced some dead spots.

The casts are as listed in the programme, but varied from night to night. Some of the listed performers may not have appeared in Scotland.