Coffee-Table Notes

Scottish Opera, Glasgow Four stars Universal Basic Income probably wasn’t on Puccini’s mind back in the 1890s when he penned his backstreet tragedy of love and death amongst the starving artist set. How to make a living in the latter-day creative industries is nevertheless one of the many of-the-moment concerns in Scottish Opera’s ingenious new production, the company’s first for six months.    Using Jonathan Dove’s arrangement and a scaled down orchestra, director Roxana Haines reimagines the story for the Covid-19 created socially distanced age. Performed outdoors in what is normally the company’s car park, Haines’ new take sets the story among freelancers trying to get a break as they’re starved of work.   Chances are that writer Rodolfo, painter Marcello, busker Schaunard and thinker in residence Colline can beg, steal or borrow their way through things. For Elizabeth Llewellyn’s costume designer, Mimi, alas, it looks fatal. If only she’d got herself a sugar daddy lik...

Sound Festival @ The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen Saturday November 11 th Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stands in peri-wigged triumph. Towards the end of what's billed as 'an electronic essay collage opera', the shades-sporting eighteenth century composer looks every inch the glam-tastic pop star he was, living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful body of work. For the last hour or so, Mozart has been squaring up to Raymond Scott, one of the great-grand-daddies of twentieth century electronic music, whose experiments with gadgets and gizmos saw him invent what he called the Electronium, which was arguably the world's first self-composing synthesiser. The future would have sounded a lot different without Scott's pioneering work, and Bob Moog,who worked with him prior to inventing the epoch-changing Moog synthesiser, cited his former employer as a major influence. Here, Scott's inventions open up a wormhole in time that sees Mozart take a leap into a future that allo...