(Photo: © Catherine Ashmore) By Matthew Westphal [Playbill, 25 August 2006]

When Brian McMaster, outgoing director of the Edinburgh International Festival, looked to commission an opera for his last season in the Festival City, he turned to a Scot for the music. But not to James MacMillan, currently the best-known of Caledonian composers. Instead McMaster settled on Stuart MacRae, a relative youngster (now only 30) whose Violin Concerto had a big success in 2001 when Tasmin Little premiered it at the BBC Proms and another when Christian Tetzlaff played it in Edinburgh the following summer. (The Sunday Telegraph's critic called it "one of the best pieces of new music I have heard.")