When operas are premiered, it is rare for the librettists to get more attention than the composers. But Scottish Opera ensured plenty of publicity for its latest venture by inviting some of Scotland's best-known writers to provide the texts for five 15-minute stage works by Scottish-based composers. Apparently, it is part of a plan to eventually create a series of full-length works for the company, but none of the pieces unveiled in Five: 15 suggests the potential for anything more substantial.
Such programmes of short pieces are not new, but as with similar schemes in London, such as the Garden Venture, the results never fulfill the good intentions. Here, standards rarely rise above the workshop level, and there are few hints that the creative teams have attempted anything radical or innovative within the format.
Ironically, the one piece that does not just attempt a scaled-down version of conventional opera is perhaps the least convincing of all. In The Queens of Govan, Nigel Osborne shares composing duties with Wajahat Khan for a work that has a single protagonist, and pairs her with a sarod player (Khan himself) in telling Suhayl Saadi's story of an Asian-Glaswegian girl's search for identity. The music is an uneasy east-west amalgam, and the dramatic focus is approximate.
Of the rest, those involving Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith at least have a whiff of operatic authenticity, if a rather hand-me-down one. Rankin's terse text for Gesualdo depicts scenes in the life of the wife-murdering Renaissance composer to a thoroughly efficient, if ultimately unmemorable, score by Craig Armstrong. In Dream Angus, with music by Stephen Deazley, McCall Smith neatly adapts one of his own short stories about a marriage reconciled through dream therapy and a herd of pigs. Lyell Cresswell's prickly score for The Perfect Woman, to a rather ordinary text about plastic surgery by Ron Butlin, is more striking, but Bernard MacLaverty's libretto for The King's Conjecture, a strange medieval story of Christian theorising, gains no real piquancy from Gareth Williams's score.
The stagings, all within the same split-level set, range from competent to pure amateur dramatics, though at least under Derek Clark standards of musical performance are high, as the cast of eight singers take multiple roles through the evening. But there must be better, more imaginative ways of propagating the green shoots of new opera than drab affairs like this.
· At the Hub, Edinburgh, on Saturday and Sunday. Box office: 0131473 2015.
