Edinburgh gets a new opera house!

This heading on my Facebook post about La Boheme caused some consternation among my followers. Where, they said? The answer is Edinburgh's and my favourite concert hall, the Usher Hall! We are of course used to concert performances of operas at the Usher Hall, particularly during the Festival. I recall a great performance of West Side Story at last year's Festival, and yet I also remember how difficult it was for the singers and the young American actors to move around the orchestra and the conductor, John Eliot Gardener, on the narrow space around the orchestra on the stage.The Usher Hall’s Solution tonight was to remove the first four rows of seats in the stalls,(easily done, they do it regularly for pop concerts), and place the thirty plus musicians of the orchestra in that space. This liberates the Usher Hall stage for the 30 or 40 cast members to create the business of La Boheme with minimal props, but nice painted backdrops of Paris, to create atmosphere with a bit of clever lighting. Add to that the very good acoustics of the Usher Hall, among the best in Britain, and you have an opera house.

I hope Fergus Linehan, the Edinburgh Festival director, came to see the Ellen Kent operas, not to have them in the festival (they aren't good enough) but to see how they created a new opera house in Edinburgh! It took 50 years of campaigning to get Edinburgh's Opera House, the Festival Theatre, and Ellen Kent and the Usher Hall did it overnight! Perhaps Fergus could try this for future Festivals and commission new productions from Scottish Opera who have become very skilled at mounting semi-staged productions of rarely performed operas in the last few years. Scottish Opera is one of our flagship companies in Scotland, but we haven't seen enough of them at the Edinburgh Festival, partly because the previous director, the unlamented Jonathan Mills (in my opinion the worst Festival director in my 50 years experience of the Festival!) didn't seem to like them, and partly because of the cost of fully mounted productions at the Festival Theatre. Hence we have tended to get hand-me-down productions from regional European opera companies some of which are okay but not great.

I recall the words of Tim Ashley, the Guardian's opera critic some years ago "The Edinburgh Festival can no longer claim to be of international quality as far as opera is concerned”. Fergus Linehan is a very good Festival director and he has improved the opera output, particularly in the Festival's 70th anniversary year, when he said to me at his press launch "Hugh I think you are going to like this year’s programme"! With nine operas I thought I had gone to heaven! Fergus says he would love to restore the Festival's international reputation in opera, remember the Festival used to have Callas, Domingo and other great opera stars in their productions, but it's a question of money. Here in this venue and this form of production could be a solution to cheaper productions, and Scottish Opera could tour the productions round Scotland afterwards.