The music had not even subsided at the gala concert opening Scottish Opera’s new season last week when the company’s artistic director, Sir Richard Armstrong, mounted a furious challenge to the fiscal reorganization plan being forced on the Opera by the Scottish government. “Armstrong’s words suggested that the cuts forced by the Executive will, after the initial shock, be increasingly challenged… The structural underfunding which caused the gradual descent into debt has not been addressed, although clearly the hope is that there will be some future rectification.”