Opera Scotland

Traviata 1998Scottish Opera

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The 1997-98 season for Scottish Opera started with the brilliant idea of another look at the original 1912 concept of Ariadne auf Naxos. That version started with the performance of an abbreviated text of Molière's comedy Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. This was seen at an early Edinburgh Festival in 1950, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, but had not been seen in Scotland since. The new production, which played at the 1997 Edinburgh Festival, was a co-production with Nottingham Playhouse. The conventional revision, with prologue, followed as part of the main season.

That season started with a long Opera-Go-Round tour of The Barber of Seville. This was followed by eight main stage productions: Norma, Rigoletto, Peter Grimes, Tosca, Così fan tutte, Ariadne auf Naxos, The Queen of Spades and La traviata. In addition there were concert performances of Handel's Samson and three performances of a double bill of Param Vir's Snatched by the Gods and Broken Strings.

This was an excellent revival of the Nuria Espert production, directed by Peter Watson and vividly conducted by Richard Armstrong, with Claire Rutter returning as Violetta, even more accomplished than before. The new Alfredo, Nikolai Schukoff, was something of a find – a young Austrian with a superb voice and who was also an excellent actor. Sadly, he did not return to Scottish Opera, and his next Scottish appearance was as Erik in a concert performance of The Flying Dutchman given at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival by the Hamburg State Opera. His repertoire by this time stretched to the heavy end of the Wagnerian repertoire. An example of the care taken with this revival was the fact that Alex Reid designed handsome new costumes for the ladies, projecting the opera back to the middle of the century.