Animal magic

The annual collaboration between Scottish Opera and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama is, as the principal of the RSAMD writes, ‘a model…for partnership working between professionals and professionals-in-training’, and it is hard to think of any work more suitable for this partnership than Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen.

The annual collaboration between Scottish Opera and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama is, as the principal of the RSAMD writes, ‘a model…for partnership working between professionals and professionals-in-training’, and it is hard to think of any work more suitable for this partnership than Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen.

The 76 players in the orchestra include 21 RSAMD students, and the singers are mainly young professionals, with several of the chief roles being double cast. A bit regretfully I saw the production in Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, a cavernous and unappealing venue, presenting problems of orchestral balance which wouldn’t have arisen in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal.