VoxCarnyx

General Director Alex Reedijk is 20 years in the post as he launches Scottish Opera’s new season. He looks forward and back with Keith Bruce.

As Scottish Opera launches the programme for its 2026/27 season, there are a number of anniversaries to be acknowledged. In descending order of antiquity, they include the 200th anniversary of the death of Beethoven, the centenary of the birth of the company’s founder Sir Alexander Gibson, the 50th anniversary of the death of Benjamin Britten, the 30th anniversary of the first Scottish Opera production by Glasgow’s internationally-renowned opera director Sir David McVicar, and the 20th season of General Director Alex Reedijk.

During a long chat in his office at ScotOp HQ, Reedijk was persuaded to look at the path that brought him to that milestone, but was careful to ensure that the others were all celebrated along the way.

To begin with the season, the headline is that it contains six new productions, which is an impressive figure in comparison with recent years, and that has been achieved with clever husbanding of resources.

As already announced, it begins at the Edinburgh International Festival with Missy Mazzoli’s The Galloping Cure, reuniting the team behind the global hit Breaking the Waves.

“It is already booked to go on to Sweden, San Francisco, Canadian Opera and Adelaide,” Reedijk reveals. “It is a piece that needs to be told, and it speaks to our international standing. Missy Mazzoli is in my view the most important female opera composer in the world today, certainly in the English language.”

Co-commissioned by many of those other companies, and working again with Opera Ventures and the EIF, Reedijk is clear that only that range of partnerships make the budget the piece requires attainable.

The company will also be at the Lammermuir Festival in September as usual, a one-off programme in St Mary’s Kirk, Haddington including Britten’s Les illuminations, Phaedre, and Our Hunting Fathers.

Sir David McVicar’s Scottish Opera career began in 1996 with Mozart’s Idomeneo, and he follows up the hugely successful production of Puccini’s Il trittico with the same composer’s final masterpiece, Turandot, premiered a century ago.

The new staging, with Trine Bastrup Moller in the title role, Victor Starsky as Calaf and Hye-Youn Lee as Liu, has the same creative team as Il trittico and will use the original “Alfano One” completion, with its redemptive extra closing scene.

There are many links to other recent Scottish Opera triumphs in the company’s return to the operas of Handel in February. Alcina will be directed by Olivia Fuchs, who was responsible for last year’s acclaimed The Makropulos Affair, designed by Yanina Thavoris, who created the fine set for Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London in 2024, and lit by Jack Wiltshire, last with the company in the same year’s Albert Herring. With Dmitri Jurowski conducting, the cast includes a company debut from soprano Madeline Boreham in the title role.

The same month, and the same set and lighting, adapted by Thavoris and Wiltshire, will see performances in Glasgow and Edinburgh of Fidelio as Scottish Opera’s contribution to the Beethoven 200 season which also features Scotland’s orchestras. Directed by Ruth Knight and conducted by Kensho Watanabe, it will feature Julia Sporsen as Leonore and Thorbjorn Gulbrandsoy as Florestan.

McVicar’s new Turandot is co-produced with Irish National Opera and will go to Dublin in 2027, and Daisy Evans’ new staging of Madama Butterfly, which was seen there last year, is also a co-production and comes to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness and Aberdeen in May and June next year.

Evans’ work includes Scottish Opera’s Albert Herring and the pandemic-era filmed version of Menotti’s The Telephone as well as the 2023 Edinburgh Festival success, Bluebeard’s Castle. Presenting Butterfly’s familiar plot as the recollections of Kate Pinkerton, her reading of Puccini has been highly praised.

Her design partner Kat Heath also creates the set for a new Cosi fan tutte in Glasgow and Edinburgh that will be cast from the students of the new Advanced Artist Diploma in Opera at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. A partnership between Scottish Opera and the RCS, it will sit alongside the Conservatoire’s Masters degree at the Alexander Gibson Opera School and, in Reedijk’s words, “prepare young singers for the world of work.” The Dunedin Consort’s artistic director John Butt will conduct Rebecca Meltzer’s production.

The next step for some of those young people may be as Emerging Artists with Scottish Opera, and their work always includes an extensive tour to halls and community venues in every corner of Scotland. Once Opera-Go-Round, more recently Opera Highlights, and now Opera On Your Doorstep, it undergoes a radical revision this year with a condensed version of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel hitting the road in Autumn and Spring for 34 performances.

Reedijk sees it as an important development “in the spirit of evolution.”

“I don’t know if the step away from programmes of arias is forever, but it is time for a change. Hansel and Gretel is a good title for a small scale tour, sung in English with piano accompaniment, and an opportunity to have five singers instead of four and a locally-recruited children’s chorus.

As we had already moved from arias to scenes from operas, it is good to go all the way to a full show, within our means.”

As well as the Diploma initiative with singers at the Conservatoire, the opera company is also working with other institutions of further education, including City of Glasgow College, on skills-building in other areas of the creative arts that go into producing opera. Reedijk points out that the company’s head of costume started her career as a costume trainee alongside a cohort of Emerging Artists.

That appreciation of what goes on behind the performances is unsurprising because the man celebrating his 20th season in charge of Scottish Opera began his career as a stage technician.

“I came to the UK in 1984, on the back of working in theatre and opera in New Zealand. My first job was as a stage hand at Richmond Theatre and from there I went to the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). That led to a summer job as head of technical at Assembly Theatre in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1988 and an early introduction to Scottish Opera, because I needed a replica painting for a Fringe show and was put in touch with Kelvin Guy, head of scenic art at Scottish Opera.”

Reedijk’s work then travelled a circuit that became familiar to many working in the arts at the time. William Burdett-Coutts, who ran Assembly at the Edinburgh Fringe was also in charge of Glasgow’s Mayfest, where Reedijk became technical boss, with the same job at Wexford Opera in Ireland falling between the two in the calendar.

Return visits to New Zealand for the biennial pan-arts festival in Wellington led to working on converting a concert hall for opera productions there.

“New Zealand Opera had gone bust and the festival became the only home for opera in New Zealand, initially importing productions from Australia and then creating their own shows, the second of which was David McVicar’s Fidelio, in 1998.”

When NZ Opera was reconstituted, Reedijk was asked to run the company and he remained there until 2006 when the invitation to come to Scottish Opera arrived.

“When I started in February 2006 I never expected to be here as long, but it is a great place: big enough to do major works and small enough to be flexible and recognise that not everything has to be on a three-year cycle.”

Particularly since the arrival of Stuart Stratford as Music Director, whose previous experience also included a lot of work outside of conventional opera houses, Reedijk has overseen a company that has been open to new experiences and experimentation. That approach came into its own during the Covid pandemic when Scottish Opera was leagues ahead in terms of its response to the health emergency.

Reedijk says: “Opera is a very adaptable, robust art form and you can make it work elsewhere than the main stages. My festival technical background gave me the confidence to look at a problem like the pandemic and go for possible solutions.

“Sometimes people travel under the assumption that opera can only be done in a temple of art, but my view is that it is robust enough to be done anywhere. Storytelling through music and theatre is strong enough to be adaptable to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.

“And the company stepped up to the challenge, during what were anxious and frightening times.”

Reedijk’s era has also seen a turn-around from Scottish Opera’s regular trips to the government with the begging bowl, as another whopping deficit threatened the company’s survival.

“Financially, my commitment when I started was that we would move from a position of entitlement to one taking responsibility for ourselves. We are charged to make the best of our circumstances and while those are challenging, it was ever thus. We have to use the resources we have available to make amazing work, and live within our means.

“My job is to hang on the legacy of what Alex Gibson set up for Scotland. It’s hard to start something, very difficult to run it, and dead easy to close it. I’m not having that happen on my watch.”

And how long has that watch to run now? As well as clocking up 20 years, Reedijk has also turned 65.

“Stuart and I have a couple of titles we want to get over the line before the close of the decade. Essential works that the company either hasn’t done in a while or not done at all.

“But I do ask myself if it is time to get out the way. Should I open the door for someone else to come in and set a different vision for the company? There are just a few more things I want to see through.”

Full details of new season at scottishopera.org.uk

Portrait of Alex Reedijk by Kirsty Anderson; Irish National Opera’s Madama Butterfly by Ros Kavanagh