THE name of "Scottish Opera-Go-Round" is no longer in use by our national opera company, but the coming season will see the organisation getting out and about in new ways, as music director Stuart Stratford promised when he was appointed. Back in 2015, he spoke of his admiration for director Graham Vick's Birmingham Opera Company and its versions of major works of the opera repertoire in unusual venues and including non-professional performers.

In June of next year, at the end of a new season unveiled today, Scottish Opera will stage a new production of Leoncavallo's Pagliacci or The Clowns, sung in English in a tented venue, pitched somewhere in the Greater Glasgow area that has yet to be finalised. Stratford will conduct and Bill Bankes-Jones's production will have a company of almost 200, the orchestra and principal singers being joined a professional and community chorus and professional and amateur circus performers. This site-specific promenade production may not yet have a site, but The Herald understands that somewhere on the road towards City of Culture-bidding Paisley may be under consideration.

Before then, the opera company is taking to the ocean wave with a new version of it Pop-Up Opera roadshow that involves a converted pilot cutter instead of an articulated lorry trailer. With the road-going version appearing again at the Perth Festival of the Arts at the end of May with scenes from Puccini's La Boheme and Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance, the vessel Murray McDavid will take those shows, together with Alan Penman and Allan Dunn's Bubble McBea for children aged 3 to 7, to marinas at Port Bannatyne, Rhu, Portavadie, Troon and elsewhere. With the four singers plus piano tours of Opera Highlights on the road across Scotland in Autumn and Spring, general director Alex Reedijk points with some pride to the map at the front of the new season brochure that shows the 48 Scottish locations that will receive a visit from Scottish Opera during its currency.

Even younger opera-goers will have their own Scottish Opera show at the Edinburgh Fringe this year when BambinO, created for infants of 6 to 18 months, takes up residence in Edinburgh Academy with two morning performances each day. Directed by Improbable Theatre's Phelim McDermott, the successor to BabyO is entitled BambinO and written by Scottish Opera's composer-in-residence Lliam Paterson. It premieres in July at the Pavilion Theatre, Manchester, as part of the Manchester International Festival.

The company's mainstage programme begins at the Edinburgh International Festival with the already-announced revival of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Greek in a co-production with Opera Ventures, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbons and part of the Festival's 70th birthday celebrations, having been premiered at Leith Theatre in the EIF's 1988 programme. This new staging, which stars acclaimed young baritone Alex Otterburn as anti-hero Eddy, will come to Glasgow for two performances at the Theatre Royal at the start of February 2018.

Although the season at the start of next year is not as cutting-edge as the current one has been, Greek is followed by another contemporary classic in Jonathan Dove's Flight, receiving its first professional production in Scotland. Commissioned and premiered by Glyndebourne Opera, and inspired by the story of a refugee who lived for years at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, Dove's comedy, with a libretto by April de Angelis, is one of the most successful modern operas, with subsequent productions across the USA and in Australia. Scottish Opera's is derived from a version at Opera Holland Park in London and will be re-staged by its director Stephen Barlow, with soprano Jennifer France, who was singing Rossini in concert for the company this weekend, in the cast and Stratford conducting.

The conductor of Sunday's Rossini, David Parry, returns to the company for this autumn's revival of Sir David McVicar's production of Verdi's La Traviata, premiered by Scottish Opera in 2008, with Gulnara Shafigullina as Violetta and Anush Hovhannisyan as Alfredo. Otterburn is also in this cast, and the revival, directed by Marie Lambert, tours from Glasgow's Theatre Royal in October to His Majesty's in Aberdeen, Eden Court in Inverness and Edinburgh's Festival Theatre.

In March 2018, Glasgow and Edinburgh see a new production of Ariadne auf Naxos, directed by Antony McDonald, who created the acclaimed Rusalka last year. A co-production with Opera Holland Park, its cast is headed by American soprano Mardi Byers in her first UK appearances, and includes Sir Thomas Allen as the Music Master and Scots tenor and broadcaster Jamie MacDougall as the Dancing Master.

Next Spring's main house programme concludes with a new Eugene Onegin, the first time Scottish Opera has presented Tchaikovsky's masterpiece in that way since 1993, with Welsh soprano Natalya Romaniw, who made her company debut in Rusalka, as Tatyana. The Royal Opera's recently-appointed director of opera, Oliver Mears, directs, with Stratford again conducting, and the production will also tour to Aberdeen, Inverness and Edinburgh.

scottishopera.org.uk