Music

Scotland's First Opera School

The opening in 1998 of Scotland's first and only opera school, the Alexander Gibson Opera School, represented a hugely significant development for the Academy. The School houses rehearsal and coaching rooms and a stunning performance space used by opera and postgraduate drama students.

Sir Alexander Gibson CBE 1926-1995
Principal Conductor and Musical Director, Scottish National Orchestra 1958-84. Honorary President 1984-95.

Founder and Artistic Director, Scottish Opera 1962-1985 Music Director 1985-1987 Conductor Laureate 1987-1995

President of the RSAMD 1991-1995

When Alexander Gibson returned to his native Scotland in 1959, it was with three major ambitions. As the first Scot ever to be appointed Principal Conductor of the SNO, he wanted to lift the orchestra's repertoire out of the trough of German and Austrian classics into which it had sunk in the hands of Karl Rankl and Hans Swarowsky; he wanted to take his players on foreign tour for the first time in living memory; and he wanted them, during their then depressingly extensive off-season, to form the basis of a great national opera company, the first of its kind to have been founded in Scotland.

In all three aims he spectacularly, and swiftly, succeeded.

 How he did so was a glorious example of being the right man in the right place at the right time. In the year of his homecoming Scotland was by no means a nest of singing birds. For their operatic experience, the public had to rely on local amateurs, on the Edinburgh Festival, and on occasional visits from Sadler's Wells, with Gibson himself at the helm in the days when he was the youngest musical director of the company that was destined to become English National Opera.

Gibson, in what seemed like a flash of operatic lightning, had already shown he could galvanise one amateur Scottish company into presenting a searing account of Verdi's Nabucco, with David Ward as its star. It was with the Dumbarton-born singer, at that time Principal Bass at Covent Garden, that Gibson in his London flat had regularly talked late into the night about forming Scottish Opera. A 1961 season, with Ward in a production of Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle, was pusillanimously vetoed by the Arts Council. But by the following year Gibson had triumphed with pioneering performances of Pelleas et Melisande and Madama Butterfly which laid the foundations of a company capable of transforming every performance into an event and every season into a festival.

Butterfly was the first opera Gibson conducted for Scottish Opera. It was also, 32 years later, to be the last, just before his death at the age of 68. By then the company had its own theatre in Glasgow, a full-length season to sustain, and a different musical director in charge. Gibson's most famous performances - The Ring, The Trojans, der Rosenkavalier, Otello and Falstaff - were by then part of operatic history, but his achievement lives on.

 When the RSAMD fully established its Opera Class as an active force, it was surely in response to that achievement. Gibson himself had studied piano at the Academy and in his last years, was to become its President. Though he never presented an opera there, he was delighted to conduct student orchestras in music of which he was especially fond. He steered the Academy Orchestra through Tchaikovsky's neglected Manfred Symphony, not merely because it was a work he cared about but because it provided scope for the Stevenson Hall's fine new organ.

For the School of Music's centenary celebrations in 1991, he conducted Sibelius's Second Symphony, a work with which he was closely associated, and in 1994, in what was to be one of his last public appearances, guided the students through the valedictory riches of Elgar's Second Symphony.

Originally, it seems, he had asked to conduct Elgar's first. But the Academy, for reasons of its own, wanted the Second. Since it was a masterpiece about which his feelings were equally passionate, Gibson had no problem accepting the proposal. He seized his opportunity, however, to lay down a condition of a sort that was very characteristic of him. As prelude to the Elgar, he proposed a performance of Sibelius's Sixth Symphony, that evocative but elusive picture of Winter breaking into Spring - music so subtle and understated that most Sibelius conductors tend to pass it by, and most orchestras, as a result, seldom play it.

In asking to conduct it, Gibson was saying something about himself as well as about the music. Though he enjoyed dynamic, pulsating pieces, as his Academy performances of Kabalevsky's Colas Breugnon and Berloiz's Les francs-juges overtures confirmed, he reserved a special side of himself for works as oblique and fine-spun as the Sibelius.

 Yet even in that final concert in the Stevenson Hall, with death stalking in his footsteps, it would never have occurred to him that the RSAMD would commemorate him by bestowing his name upon the new Opera School it was hoping to build. As President, he knew about these plans. As Scotland's most skilled operatic conductor, he had given advice. But he was surely far too modest to think that, for services rendered to opera in Scotland, the building would eventually bear his name.

Yet he deserved nothing less: without Gibson's vision, it would be hard to imagine opera in Scotland developing to the point where the Alexander Gibson Opera School was not only an aspiration but a reality.

Text taken from The Passionate Pioneer by Conrad Wilson.

Conrad Wilson is the author of Alex, the authorised biography of Sir Alexander Gibson.