Opera Highlights 2025: the Scottish Opera tour taking arias to all areas of Scotland

The Opera Highlights team on tour in 2024. Everything needed for the shows has to fit into a single van | Courtesy of Scottish Opera

Ask the team behind Scottish Opera’s popular Opera Highlights tours what single factor guarantees the slick success of the company’s long-running whistle-stop road trips around Scotland, and the response is disarmingly curt. “Everything has to fit in the back of a tiny little van,” insists Scottish Opera’s tour manager Dawn Rawcliffe. “Everything”, she adds, includes a piano and the entire staging and lighting kit, “all of which have to be offloaded and built in about four hours at each venue by just two people”.

It’s the side to touring that audiences don’t always see. The upcoming 2025 Opera Highlights tour - visiting 24 venues ranging from the well-appointed Cumbernauld Theatre to a tiny community centre on Shetland’s Isle of Yell from 25 January to 22 March - is a typical example. Other stop-offs include Kelso, Peebles, Ullapool, Durness, Tarbert and Stranraer, and in each place a compact cast of four singers and music director/pianist Joseph Beesley will be moulding a potpourri of operatic extracts into a cohesive evening’s entertainment. The performances are just the tip of the iceberg though: behind the scenes, the tour is a complex operation, conceived and developed over months of detailed planning, making it as creatively challenging as any full-scale production.

“In every one of these venues, the cast need to know exactly what’s facilitating the show backstage,” Rawcliffe explains. “We’ve had venues in the past where the singers actually have to leave the building mid-scene, come around the outside and re-enter the stage by a different door. That kind of thing can only be decided on the day.”

Such unpredictability, she adds, is the lifeblood of the initiative. “In some venues you can have a member of the audience sitting right next to the pianist, yet that’s actually what makes Highlights unique - the audience get to see it up close, literally feel the breath of the performers. That’s quite special.”

Stage director Rebecca Meltzer - last seen with Scottish Opera assisting Sir David McVicar in last season’s award-winning production of Puccini’s Il trittico - nods in agreement, but is quick to add there can be no compromising of artistic standards. “This Scottish Opera programme has been running successfully for so many years, and as a director stepping into this role I’m acutely conscious of the need to uphold the sense of ownership and connection these audiences have come to expect.”

That includes bringing fresh ideas to a tried-and-tested formula. “We’re creating an entire show from scratch: drawing on pre-existing material from a whole range of different operas, and somehow finding a key theme or narrative that combines them into one cohesive evening.”

Scottish Opera's Opera Highlights tour bus near Eilean Donan Castle | Courtesy of Scottish Opera

The process of developing that, along with head of music Fiona MacSherry and set designer Kenneth MacLeod, started in earnest back in May 2024. Equipped with MacSherry’s musical recommendations, the lightbulb moment for Meltzer came when she least excepted it. “I was travelling from Glasgow to London on a train, and while we were stationary at a platform I thought, hang on, this is a space where there are so many different stories playing out simultaneously, where the rules are so clearly defined. People are arriving, leaving, meeting one another, saying farewell. That just seemed immediately theatrical to me.”

The pieces fell instantly into place. “If we’re charting a journey of different characters whilst connecting with so many different performance locations within the Scottish landscape, the ultimate destination for each train journey could easily be the location for the show that particular night. We kind of pick up our characters as we go along, different stops along the route - like a barrage of ‘Brief Encounters.’”

Chloe Harris and Ross Cumming, shown here in Scottish Opera's recent production of Albert Herring, are part of the Opera Highlights team set to tour Scotland in 2025. | Mihaela Bodlovic

The characters are played by a quartet of young singers: three Scottish Opera Emerging Artists - baritone Ross Cumming, mezzo-soprano Chloe Harris and soprano Kira Kaplan - who are joined in his Scottish Opera debut by tenor Robert Forrest. “It’s a unique experience for them getting to do the same show 24 times and having to be instantly adaptable,” Meltzer says. “Turning up at a strange venue and not knowing quite how the evening is going to pan out is very different from performing night after night in the same theatre.”

That’s not the only skill sets these singers will be honing. For, as part of this latest Highlights Tour, Scottish Opera has initiated a brand new programme of additional engagement workshops that will bring youngsters from these communities right into the heart of the project - an initiative masterminded by theatre-maker Flora Emily Thomson.

She's been working closely with the company’s acclaimed education department since 2021, and these interactive sessions that will happen in ten of the tour venues under the title How To Stage An Opera. The aim is to introduce school children especially to the magic of storytelling through opera.

An Opera Highlights sign on Barra, with Kisimul Castle in the background | Courtesy of Scottish Opera

“Working with the professional singers, we’ll take scenes from the main production, have a little bit of chat about how it’s been staged, and talk about how these pieces lend themselves to different scenarios,” Thomson explains. “Then they’ll have a go at creating and performing in their own interpretations. It’s a kind of pick-your-own-adventure-style approach.”

“That provides a really beautiful access point for young folk to get into opera, to say to themselves ‘Oh, that’s not what I thought opera was about’. Through these engagements we’re hoping they’ll really get a sense of the play behind the process, to have some agency over that and understand how that process might lead to seeing a version that is very different from the traditional stereotype, while also appreciating those classical renditions more richly.

Not even snow can stop the Opera Highlights tour | Courtesy of Scottish Opera

With all that in place, what could possibly go wrong? “This tour has been in the planning for 18 months, but problems inevitably arise,” Rawcliffe admits. “When a ferry company changed its winter schedule recently, we realised we couldn’t get from A to B in time to make the venue. We’ve been stranded on the Outer Hebrides before, rerouted an entire tour of the islands with the help of the community, and even negotiated with a local Tai Chi class to move its meeting to a different day. There’s lots of goodwill out there, and in my time we haven’t lost a performance yet.” All being well, this year’s opera train will run perfectly to time.

Scottish Opera’s 2025 Opera Highlights tour opens at Cumbernauld Theatre on 25 January, and visits venues throughout Scotland until 22 March. See www.scottishopera.org.uk Details of How to Stage an Opera sessions are available at www.scottishopera.org.uk/shows/how-to-stage-an-opera/ Produced in partnership with Scottish Opera