Scottish Opera: Orchestrating change

Published on Tuesday 25 May 2010 19:02

THE timing could not have been worse. Just as Scottish Opera was making final preparations to set out its stall for the new 2010-11 season – launched today – word finally got out last week that the full-time future of its house orchestra is in serious jeopardy.

Understandably, Scottish Opera general director Alex Reedijk was keener to talk about the new season's diet of operas, partly because the company is at a sensitive point in negotiations with its orchestral players, and particularly because his first head-to-head with the Musicians' Union on this matter began early this week.

But it is impossible to separate the two issues. For not only does the "economy" of the new season reflect Scottish Opera's manful struggle to maintain a sustainable high-profile presence in the public domain ever since its artistic castration by the Scottish Government six years ago.

It also underlines the inevitability facing the orchestra, that there comes a point when attempts to justify its full-time existence seem like a desperate last measure.

The killer statistic is the one issued by Scottish Opera last week, which claimed the company was paying about 50 full-time salaries – thought to range between a basic 25,000 for rank-and-file to principal salaries of around 33,000 – for an orchestra that is effectively working at only 35 per cent capacity. Think back to 2004 when a similar dilemma faced the Scottish Opera Chorus, and when members of the orchestra must have been thinking "there but for the grace of God go I". The chorus was disbanded and singers are now brought in on a freelance basis as and when required.

This is not a new issue. Cast your mind back to the early 1990s, when a thoroughly misconceived merger between the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Scottish Opera Orchestra was mooted, only to be thrown out of court by a realisation that the only beneficiary would have been the opera company, whose orchestra, even then, was seriously underused.

Even when the orchestra was founded three decades ago, the grounds were questionable. Up till then, its function had been largely fulfilled by the Scottish National Orchestra (now the RSNO), whose musical director, Sir Alexander Gibson, was also the founding musical director of Scottish Opera. According to one seasoned RSNO player who was around at the time, the orchestra told Gibson it no longer wished to spend so much time in the Theatre Royal pit. Gibson's blunt response was to engineer the formation of a dedicated house band.

It was rumoured at the time that part of the funding came from a government job creation scheme, which naturally exhausted itself within a couple of years leaving the company with a full-time orchestra it had not realistically budgeted for. Is it a coincidence that Scottish Opera's first major financial crisis occurred in the immediate aftermath?

Who knows why the band has survived intact for so long? But the problem remains, and has become increasingly exacerbated by the fact that Scottish Opera's large-scale performing schedule is now a pale reflection of what it once was. Things are at an all-time low for the band in terms of active involvement, and a quick examination of the four main scale operas announced for next season shows that some of these salaried musicians might hardly be needed at all.

Handel's Orlando – conducted by Baroque specialist Paul Goodwin – requires only flutes, oboes, two horns and a bassoon in addition to the central core of strings. For Thomas Allen's new production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro add two clarinets, trumpets and timpani. Meanwhile the remaining horns, trombones, percussion and harp are left twiddling their thumbs until Richard Strauss's Intermezzo and Verdi's Rigoletto in March and May 2011 respectively.

The situation was more palatable in the days when Scottish Opera presented an annual season of eight or nine big operas. But today's bare-boned seasons merely expose skeletons that have been lying far too long in the orchestral cupboard.

It's not enough to argue that a small chamber core of the orchestra finds itself further involved in such small-scale touring productions as next year's Carmen, which will be performed as part of an interesting new relationship Reedijk has established with Glasgow's Citizen's Theatre, before heading out to 22 smaller venues around Scotland.

Nor will the company's collaboration with the Traverse Theatre and Music Theatre Wales in Philip Glass's In the Penal Colony help the orchestra's case, as the Kafka-inspired chamber opera involves only four stage characters and a string quintet.

The plain truth is this. Scottish Opera has weathered deeply unpleasant times in recent years, but has resolved to move with them. The employment of a full symphonic orchestra (not even the RSNO or the BBC SSO employ a salaried harp these days) simply does not square with the current performance pattern of a company pared to the bone.

The small annual series of orchestral concerts, planned again next season at St Andrews-in-the-Square in Glasgow, is an irrelevant attempt to balance the equation. We have enough of these on a superlative scale from the three established national orchestras. This is not a priority area for Scottish Opera.

So what's the solution? The last thing any music critic wants to do is advocate the eradication of an entire orchestra, especially one that has given valued service to opera in Scotland, and in its early days around the UK and even overseas.

But that is not what is needed, nor essentially what this current skirmish is about. First and foremost, Scottish Opera requires instrumental support for its productions, including its excellent educational projects. Of that there is no question. But little of that warrants the permanent employment of the full orchestral toolbox.

Options vary from a possible collaboration with Scottish Ballet – which presents its own difficulties in terms of the existing freelance ballet orchestra and clashing schedules – to putting the players on first-call contracts, which means they would effectively become freelance players, offered first refusal on the work available and free to work elsewhere when not required.

That latter model is how the Scottish Chamber Orchestra operates. And who knows, it might just sort out an embarrassing and untenable anomaly that has lain protected and unchallenged for far too long.

&#149 For full details on Scottish Opera's 2010-11 season, see www.scottishopera.org.uk