Ullapool and Tain dates confirmed for Scottish Opera highlights tour as tickets go on sale
COMMUNITIES in Easter and Wester Ross are being invited to a one-of-a-kind performance showcasing opera highlights.
Tickets are now on sale for the playful new production of Scottish Opera’s Opera Highlights, which explores and celebrates the country’s rich landscape.
It hits the road in January visiting 24 communities, amongst them Ullapool and Tain.
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Taking part are emerging artists soprano Kira Kaplan, mezzo-soprano Chloe Harris and baritone Ross Cumming, currently seen by audiences in the company’s production of Britten’s Albert Herring.
They are joined by tenor Robert Forrest, making his company debut. Accompanying the singers on piano is music director Joseph Beesley.
The director is Rebecca Meltzer, who last worked with Scottish Opera as assistant director on the award-winning production of Puccini’s ll trittico in 2023. Designs are by Kenneth MacLeod, who won the 2024 UK Theatre Award for Best Design for the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning.
The playlist combines a collection of much-loved classics with a treasure trove of lesser-known pieces. These include music from Beethoven’s Fidelio, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, Handel’s Ariodante, Rossini’s Les soirées musicales alongside an aria from Hamlet by French composer Ambroise Thomas.
This production features longer excerpts of operas than in previous Opera Highlights productions, mainly sung in English. In Rebecca Meltzer’s production they form vignettes taking place at the country’s many varied train stations, and these are places of greetings and goodbyes, reunions and setting off on new adventures, where all walks of life can coexist and interact equally.
Meltzer said: “I’m thrilled to be presenting the next Opera Highlights tour which places Scottish heritage and culture at its heart. Through the course of the performance, we invite you to join us on a journey across Scotland, encountering the lives, loves and losses of an array of different characters. A range of exciting operatic extracts, the majority of which are performed in English, allow the audience to explore the breadth of human experience, as exhibited in the lives of those who come and go from the platform of one of Scotland’s many railway stations.”
While on tour with Opera Highlights, Scottish Opera is running 11 school and four community workshops, including in Tain and Ullapool.
Entitled ‘How to stage an opera’, these free, interactive sessions are led by theatre-maker Flora Emily Thomson, and those attending will learn about the process of powerful storytelling through opera, using scenes from the Opera Highlights tour as inspiration.
Together with the show’s music director and two singers, Emily will explore how music can illustrate dramatic context on stage, and the mechanics of staging and directing scenes from an opera. Participants learn how singers use their voices and stage techniques to generate atmosphere and create mood to develop character, and how basic props can support the time, location and even the weather in which the story is unfolding.
These sessions, lasting approximately one hour, are open to all ages, and no previous experience is required. They are supported by The McGlashan Charitable Trust.
Opera Highlights is supported by Friends of Scottish Opera.
Tickets are on sale now at www.scottishopera.org.uk/shows/opera-highlights-2025/
It will be in the Duthac Centre, Tain at 7pm on Tuesday, February 4 and at the Macphail Centre in Ullapool on Tuesday, March 11 March at 7pm. The ‘How to stage an opera’ workshop will additionally be staged at the Duthac Centre in Tain on Tuesday, February 4 at 1.30pm.
