Since taking up his post as General Director of Scottish Opera back in 2006 Kiwi, Alex Reedijk has been credited with turning around the fortunes and reinvigorating a company that had often been in the headlines less for its productions than its back room disputes.

Now five years into the job and with a new season about to be announced, The Wee Review took the chance to talk with him about his time in the job, the innovations he’s brought to the company and of course what to expect in the months ahead.

Let’s begin with a nice easy question: What can we expect from Scottish Opera’s new season?

There’s a total of eight operas this season, four of which are our core subscription series starting with a revival of Thomas Allen’s Barber of Seville followed by a new production of Hansel and Gretel directed by Bill Bankes-Jones who runs Tête à Tête opera festival who has also done a new translation. David McVicar returns to do his first production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress conducted by Sian Edwards and we’re reviving our the fantastic 1980 Anthony Besh version of Tosca.

Accompanying the subscription series will be our annual collaboration with the RSAMD which this year is Prokofiev’s wacky comedy Betrothal in a Monastery or La Duenna.

Opening the season is a collaboration with Scottish based company Company Chordelia with a production of Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins which will be performed as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe at the HMV Picture House on Lothian Road before coming over to the O2 ABC in Glasgow. The idea being that the slightly seedy nature and setting of the story suggested to me that doing it in a clean proscenium arch theatre wouldn’t make sense but doing it somewhere more down to earth like the Picture House would be exactly right. Although it’s still a fully staged opera with sets, props, costumes and forty piece orchestra.

Alongside this at the Fringe we’re presenting, in partnership with Music Theatre Wales, Mark Anthony Turnage’s Greek so with both pieces we’re shaping a twentieth and twenty-first century presence in in the context of the Edinburgh Festivals.

Finally our touring production this year is Offenbach’s Orpheus In The Underworld with a new translation by Rory Bremner.

As in Rory Bremner satirist and impressionist?

The very same. Rory actually goes back a long way with opera and he’s not just a very clever writer but also a very good linguist and has a passion for music and for opera. We saw this production of Orpheus as a perfect opportunity to work with a new partner.

I’m extremely proud of the fact that we’re doing some bloody good storytelling

I’m fascinated by the process of creating an opera season. What dictates the choices that are made in creating the programme?

At the heart of the programming of Scottish Opera are three things really. One of which is that, by various units of measure, there are around fifteen top operas around the world and I think it’s our duty as a national company to take a good look at those. And of the four main operas we do each season two of those every year are drawn from the top fifteen and so if we do two a year about every seven or eight years it’s time to repeat one of these operas.

At the same time I think it’s important to do at least one piece of work by a well known composer but a lesser known work like this season’s production of Humperdink’s Hansel and Gretel.

The fourth opera tends to be a piece that’s not done very often in the UK and is often by a lesser known or lesser regarded composer; so something like Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress which is a fascinating piece and adds a real richness to the diet of what we can offer our audiences.

You’ve then got to balance this against, for example the choice of touring opera, in this case Orpheus In The Underworld which is a chance to offer a title that we might not do on the full stage. Nevertheless we take it very seriously in order to be able to sell it properly to our audiences around Scotland and by having Rory Bremner doing the translation it gives it an immediacy and a reason for being in the twenty-first century.

With Seven Deadly Sins, Kurt Weill was chosen because I think it’s right that we do as much twentieth century opera as we can. Now we’ve reached the twenty first century we can look back and see there’s an awful lot of rich pickings there.  However those operas don’t always lend themselves to a proscenium arch theatre so it gives us an opportunity for an adventure somewhere else.

So it’s trying to mix and match adventure, cost, size; big opera, small opera; large chorus, small chorus, no chorus; theatre availability; all the things we think an audience might respond to.

The other part of it is that Francesco (Corti – S/Os Musical Director) and I try to balance not only what we’re doing in this season but also: what did last season feel like and what might the season after this feel like? So over a three year period you might have a balanced basket of about eighteen to twenty operas which the audience will say were all great productions even if they were different productions.

It’s also been designed to take live professional singing to as many of the smaller communities of Scotland as possible

Since you arrived at Scottish Opera you’ve brought in a lot of innovations. Is there anything you’re particularly proud of?

There’s lot of things I’m proud of: one of which is that the company remains on a sound financial footing. I’m also very proud that the Five-Fifteen initiative which creates new opera here in Scotland has absolutely taken off, exceeding my expectations, as has the Emerging Artists Programme which we brought on to encourage young singers to remain in Scotland.

I’m particularly proud of the fact that we’re well under way with rebuilding our audiences both in terms of raw numbers and in terms of their enthusiasm for the company. We know this is true because it’s our subscription season that’s increasing most of all. Also the anecdotal feedback we’re getting from the subscribers is that the seasons are getting better and better and that they really love the work that’s being done.

I’m extremely proud of the fact that we’re doing some bloody good storytelling and that, whilst each piece might not be for everybody, nevertheless it’s still terrific storytelling. For instance with our recent production of Orlando a lot of people told me “you know Handel’s not for me, I really didn’t want to go but felt I should. But I came away having had a fantastic time, it’s the first time I really got Handel”.

It is an ethos that runs very strongly through the company, not just the quality of the singing and the playing but also the storytelling.

You’ve mentioned the Emerging Artist Programme, can you tell us a little more about that and how important you feel it is for the company?

When I started I was concerned, based upon my previous experiences in New Zealand, that young singers were coming out of academies certainly able to sing but with very little practical stage and theatre experience. What I wanted to do was to create a performance programme that enabled young people to be attached to a professional opera company spending a year or two or whatever suited them, working closely with us, singing a number of roles and being given various smaller performance opportunities so that they could really build the core of their skills. Therefore when they eventually moved on in their careers they would have a rock solid foundation from which to work.

Of course the person who started all this was Nadine Livingston who’s gone on to sing a number of important roles with us and is quietly regarded as a very bright young Scottish star in the making.

I also felt it was an opportunity for us to become much closer to the RSAMD. Being physically opposite each other on Hope Street it seemed a unique opportunity in a UK context to bring a conservatoire and an opera company much closer together with both able to draw on each other. Also, it was a genuine desire to create work and opportunities for young performers within Scotland to try and tackle the drain of talent that heads south. Obviously you can’t stop it but at least it can be slowed down.

The other innovations brought in over the last few years have been the outreach programmes to schools and communities. Can you talk a little about them and The Opera Highlights Programme?

Well Opera Highlights has been a long standing programme with the company and it functions in two ways, one of which is to create artisan singing and touring opportunities for young singers so that every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday they have to deliver a performance to a different village community. It’s also been designed to take live professional singing to as many of the smaller communities of Scotland as possible because it’s certainly clear to me that touring throughout Scotland is a part of our DNA and a lot of people who adore our artform live in very remote and by definition small communities. So there’s no way we could bring them a fully staged opera, but what we can absolutely do is bring them the next best thing which is four wonderful young singers, a tiny bit of scenery and lighting and somebody on the piano so they still get the live human experience.

In terms of our outreach programmes our Baby O programme designed for 6 months to 18 month years old children as was a way of introducing the kids and their mums and dads to the power of music and the power of singing has been a great success. I’ve been struck by how much it’s taken off as a wonderful extension of Scottish Opera this year it’s been invited to festivals in Manchester and Norwich and last year it was in London as part of the Tête à Tête festival and we’ve also been invited to the Christchurch Arts Festival in New Zealand in September. We’ve had a lot of anecdotal evidence, parents telling us it’s the first time little Johnny has sat still for half and hour. What it’s doing is getting into their little brains the power of live singing, playing and storytelling in a meaningful way rather than a throwaway fashion.

co-productions have always been part of what opera companies do

As a reviewer I tend to see shows on the first night and the audiences still appear to be dominated by the “Tweed and Pearls” crowd. Since arriving at Scottish Opera what changes have you seen in the audience demographic?

Well I’d definitely suggest you try and come along on a more normal night because the thing I’m genuinely struck by is how much the demographic has changed. Of course it’s still about older people because they’ve got time, income and interest but at the same time thanks in particular to the strength and success of our £10 if you’re under 26 scheme, which since it started in 2006 has sold 12,000 tickets and increased the year on year under 26 attendance by 27%. We’ve seen huge changes.

It’s also why our partnership with the Scottish Sun newspaper is so important. It’s the most widely read newspaper in Scotland and we’ve done a lot of work together to demystify each other. It’s very easy to have a view of Scottish Sun readers as being one type of person but with 900,000 of them a day they have to be all sorts of people.

We’ve done two performances for Sun readers so far and they’ve given us the most authentic reactions to our work and I don’t mean that in a patronising way but in a surprised and delighted way – they really get it.

There have been many nights where I’ve found myself standing in the foyer saying “my god this is an utterly mixed demographic – it’s fantastic.”

One final question. It’s noticeable that there are more co-productions this season. Do you think that in this age of austerity that’s the future of opera and what’s your take on funding in general?

My view, to be honest, is that co-productions have always been part of what opera companies do because of the cost of putting shows on. I am trying to do more co-productions particularly with medium scale shows such as the work we’re doing with Music Theatre Wales, Company Chordelia or Northern Irish Opera, who we’re doing Orpheus with because, in many respects, one of the great areas of growth in opera is medium scale productions.

I’m fairly confident that opera as an artform in its entirety is growing in popularity in the UK and that, by and large, the big companies are enjoying a renaissance, a gentle one but a renaissance nonetheless. On top of that there are so many clever people out there who want to tell opera stories. Obviously you can’t do it all at the large scale because of cost but there are many other ways to tell those stories and I think the people behind Music Theatre Wales, Company Chordelia and Northern Ireland Opera on the scales they’re working at have got wonderful stories to tell and I believe Scottish Opera should be part of that.

I also believe it helps us bring more opera to our audiences and allows people to see opera without the formality of the large proscenium arch productions. In short I think it’s all good out there.

Of course it’s true we’re in tough times, but times are always tough and so we run it the same way you run your household – if you’ve only got 50p per week you make that go as far as you can and you make damn sure you don’t spend more than that 50p. If the next year that becomes 48p then you work hard to make that stretch. I know that’s not a full answer to your question but essentially I’m very bullish about the world we find ourselves in.