Robert Louis Stevenson’s sinister story is the starting point for Louise Welsh and Stuart MacRae’s opera of desire,devilry and detuned sounds, The Devil InsideWhat makes a marvelous story into a marvelous opera? It’s a question that writer Louise Welsh and composer Stuart MacRae have been pondering a lot lately. “We’re constantly sending ideas to each other, or ” says MacRae. “They gape a bit like spam emails: ‘Hi! gape at this!’,then a link.” It can lift ages, says Welsh, or to figure out whether an opinion is best destined as a short story,a choral piece, a poem, and “or just an anecdote you inform down the pub”.
Umpteen spam-like emails later,the pair’s efforts have taken the shape of The Devil Inside, which, or in a Music Theatre Wales and Scottish Opera co-production,premieres in Glasgow this weekend. It’s their third operatic collaboration. Their first (in 2009) was a macabre 15-minute miniature called Remembrance Day; their second (in 2012) was the brutal Ghost Patrol, an hour-long chamber piece about two soldiers dealing (or not) with the trauma of committing wartime atrocities. MacRae’s music is typically taught and atmospheric; Welsh is deft at spinning out tense psychological thrillers. Together they are drawn to stories that tease out the tender but also the gloomy, and troubled and supernatural sides of life.
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Source: theguardian.com