At the start of its own (digital) life, Soundyngs wondered what constituted ‘Scottish’ music, and decided that if it was done in, of, or about Scotland, or by a musician who self-identified as Scottish, then it should be included. By that measure of inclusiveness, we acknowledge Scotland – like all modern nations – to be diverse internally and in a complex cultural negotiation with the ocean currents of music it encounters.
The author of A Singer’s Life was born and educated in Scotland, and (passionately) considers himself Scottish, and has made Scotland his home; nevertheless, the central part of the book describes a career which has been international, and in a genre – opera – that sits in a river of Scottish music which has not always been embraced by all Scots as being, well, one of the mainstream markers of indigenous identity.
There are, however, those in Scotland who would argue that opera IS part of the musical heritage of Scotland, situating Scotland within wider European musical culture. Scottish composers, from A C Mackenzie to Thea Musgrave to James Macmillan, have composed operas, often including musical gestures or stories drawn from Scottish traditions, giving these international resonance. Rippling further out, Scottish stories have featured in works written by other Europeans as epitomizing romantic or heroic ideas, and these have shaped how Scotland is seen by outsiders (‘about’ Scotland). When Sir Alexander Gibson – a Scot – founded Scottish Opera in 1962, his aim was to make opera accessible to all Scots; like any national company, it has an international stage, but it has also championed outreach work and projects that engage with local Scottish places (‘in’ Scotland).
So opera can connect in different ways with Scotland. What can this new book, from a Scottish opera singer, tell us about the resonance of opera, particularly as championed by the national company, within Scotland?
The answer is, less than the author might have hoped at the start of his career. Aside from a couple of early years, Bannatyne-Scott has not performed with Scottish Opera. However, he clearly has strong roots in Scotland – in Edinburgh in particular – which erupt regularly and inform career decisions.
A Singers Life is a compilation of pieces written for the Edinburgh Music Review, reviews originally undertaken with the author hoping to ‘make a difference in Scottish musical life’ (p.7), but which became autobiographical during the COVID-19 shutdown when live performance everywhere was suspended.
After a couple of initial chapters that explain how a Scottish boy might have aspired to a career in opera, the structure of the book is thematic rather than chronological. Historians of Scottish musical architectural heritage should look at chapter 25, on concert halls in the UK, which discusses Edinburgh venues (p.229-30); but for the most part, anecdotes are more immediately relevant to opera audiences and potentially to younger singers hoping to build careers.
The book opens by explaining how Brian, an Edinburgh lad born to clever parents both employed by Scottish Brewers, gravitated towards opera and art music, and shows why a career as an opera soloist is not a straightforward pathway: to be fair, this would probably be true for any opera soloist, not simply to a Scot. An education at George Watson’s College – one of the independent merchant schools which continue to educate the children of the aspirant middle-class in the capital city – provided a musical education with a solid classical grounding and allowed the early identification of a fine voice.
Alexander Gibson’s Scottish Opera company was key to opening the door to opera. Richard Telfer, a teacher at George Watson’s College, had also been one of the founders of Scottish Opera. Bravely, he took pupils through to Glasgow late in 1971 to see Scottish Opera’s Ring Cycle (p.98), the first time the whole of Wagner’s operatic epic had been performed in Scotland. This was fine inspiration for the Edinburgh pupils, but possibly a project that set a challenging precedent with long term financial implications for the national company (see John Duffus’s account of Scottish Opera in Further Reading). Brian returns to his school days later in his book, remembering further other opportunities for concerts and competitions (e.g. pp.389-399).
Education is key to musical choices that young people make, and in the 1970s this was usually grounded in classical music, which provides a very specific set of analytical and practical skills. As Brian observes, the necessary classical groundwork in school that primes an operatic career may not be readily available in the 21st century. Although it might also be said, even in the 1970s, that the operatic repertoire might have been more readily accessed by a privately educated child than to a state schooled pupil.
Careful parents encouraged a humanities degree at the University of St Andrews in history and languages alongside continuing voice lessons with good Scottish voice teachers, hedging career options while the voice matured. This gave Brian a good grounding in French, a skill which was useful to his singing career. Postgraduate study took Brian to the Guildhall in London, studying with Laura Sarti. Winning the prestigious Decca Kathleen Ferrier Prize at the age of 26 launched an international career.
Opera voices – particularly the kind of dramatic bass which this singer possesses – take time to grow, and it would be true to say that the training infrastructure in Scotland in this period did not necessarily make a professional pathway easy. Brian was very fortunate in having the support of a music-loving (and informed) spouse whose career in accountancy helped to smooth over some early development stages. Again, this is probably true of opera singing in most places: it takes a lot of self-direction and vocational conviction to build a career, in addition to natural talent, and family support is often also fundamentally important. Young singers will find the insights in Brian’s book on working with agents and managing international contracts, and their own hopes and expectations, potentially useful.
At this point the account focusses on what was achieved out of Scotland – in London, Venice, Rome, and many other places, where Brian clocked up international prizes and built a career in a series of solo bass roles.
Scotland sits on the edge of the frame as a point of departure and return. The Edinburgh International Festival, always an important node connecting Scottish music with global international art music, is important to the early narrative. In 1980 it hosted televised masterclasses given by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the internationally famous Austrian lyrical soprano, which gave local boy Brian a chance to shine before a wider televised audience.
Between 1982-5, Brian was able to secular a 3-year contract as a company soloist with Scottish Opera. Scottish Opera was just settling into its own purpose-built theatre, Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, and was flourishing (relatively speaking) with a professional orchestra and chorus, Repertoire reflected continental standards – Wozzeck, Werther, The Magic Flute, etc (p.26). There is little mention of new compositions from Scottish composers, and more focus on the company’s role as a potential employer of indigenous talent. Brian fells that after Sir Alex Gibson retired, Scottish Opera’s drive to be more international meant that he and many other Scottish singers needed to look outside of their home country for work (p.28). His memories throughout the book (e.g. pp112-3) of Gibson as a conductor and musical leader are warm.
For those who wonder about the place of opera in Scotland’s cultural life, the take-away impression is perhaps that it might have, historically, rather neglected grassroots for training young Scottish singers. From the perspective of someone whose career has been as an international soloist, this may feel true, and potentially risks adding fuel to the fires of those who feel opera is not be central to Scottish culture or public funding. More, however, might be said, looking at opera in Scotland through a different lens, and examining its more recent outreach work and small touring productions (a topic not discussed in the book).
However, even back in the 1970s and 80s, Scottish Opera put resource into audience building, if not necessarily a great deal of regional voice-work. My own first contact with Scottish Opera was through its touring productions which toured small venues in the Highlands with micro-stagings of works such as La Traviata and A Soldier’s Tale. These played, in my memory, to good size (relative to location) audiences, and had a considerable impact on local audiences of all ages. Since then, the national company has put a lot of work into its outreach and education programmes, using Scottish singers to open up and develop new audiences in new kinds of venues.
Moreover – as Bannatyne-Scott’s book shows – “big” operatic voices are important not only to staged operas but also to anchor concerts (large scale orchestral oratorios and intimate recitals alike). The book mentions work with groups such as the Scottish Early Music Consort (p.50, and p.119), and the Scottish Theatre Production and Tom Fleming in their 1985-6 production of David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaites with music by Cedric Thorpe Davie, a revival of an earlier, seminal 1948 EIF production, which went up both in Edinburgh and in Warsaw (p.76-7). Opera, therefore, is not isolated, but is a part of a larger ecosystem of art music, with most performers in Scotland needing to engage with different projects at different scales to balance a career. Not everyone is, always, an international soloist; but a mixed contribution at different levels still matters to audience.
Since Brian settled back in Edinburgh as a home base from 1997, the city has provided him with opportunities for song recitals, including concert-driven recordings of Scottish art song repertoire (e.g. in 2020 a CD song cycles by Ronald Stevenson (1928-2015) and Francis George Scott (1880-1958), with lyrics by Hugh McDiarmid and Robert Louis Stevenson (pp.270-273). A further CD, Songs of Edinburgh, of new songs by Tom Cunningham (music) and Alexander McCall Smith (words) (p.386) was recorded live from a recital given in Edinburgh in August 2021.
Brian’s Edinburgh Festival concerts in more recent times have also shared the stage with younger singers and this, although less ambitious than Wagner’s Ring Cycle, contributes to opportunities open to singers and audiences in Scotland. The international, high-cost, prestige end of the spectrum described in A Singer’s Life needs to be balanced alongside this art-form’s capacity to use words, music and physical stagecraft to explore the human condition in smaller scale productions and working alongside amateurs and non-experts.
Today, looking at Scottish Opera’s website shows that the company is not only focused on the most elaborate and expensive international projects, but also uses opera skills and insights to build different kinds of musical experiences. Covid has made us aware of singers’ breathing techniques being helpful for lung health, and one strand of work has looked at therapeutic workshops for the elderly and in local communities. New compositions for schools have driven local education projects, taking opera to children rather than expecting an expert teacher to take pupils to Glasgow. See the company’s website for information about current projects, and the archival listings in Iain Fraser’s Opera Scotland website for an insight into the presence of opera both in prestige venues and more amateur contexts. This is one historical narrative where the future may look very different from the legacy of the past.
Further Reading
- Brian Bannatyne-Scott, A Singer’s Life: The Journals of a Modern Troubadour (Edinburgh, Bannatyne-Scott, 2026)
- Brian Bannatyne-Scott, bass, piano Jan Waterfield and Alan Jacques, Songs of Stevenson, CD (Birnam CD/BBS Records, 2020)
- Brian Bannatyne-Scott, Beth Taylor (Mezzo), and Michael Gajzler (piano), Songs of Edinburgh (Birnam, 2022) with samples on Youtube
- Ian Brooke (ed.), 50 Years of Scottish Opera: A Celebration (Scottish Opera, 2013)
- John Duffus, Scottish Opera’s Golden Years: The Glitter and Why it Faded (New Generation Publishing, 2022) – another autobiographical book which helps explain the challenges faced by a national company in staging traditional opera repertoire
- Huw D Jones and Susan Galloway, ‘Arts Governance in Scotland: the Saga of Scottish Opera, 1962-2007’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 31(2),
- Cordelia Oliver, It’s a Curious Story: The Tale of Scottish Opera, 1962-1987 (Mainstream, Edinburgh, 1987)
- Opera Scotland – a labour of love, listings and performance history compiled by the redoubtable Iain Fraser
- Scottish Opera website
- Conrad Wilson, Scottish Opera: the first ten years (Collins, 1972) – an account of the early years by a well-known Scottish music critic and journalist (and while you are here, Philip Sawyer’s A Life with Music: Conrad Wilson 1932-2017: music critic, journalist, author, Hardie Press, 2018, is another book that gives a reader a sense of the classical music world in Scotland over the years covered by A Singer’s Life).