Conducting Opera

Wiener Kammeroper In the mid-90s, Scott Lawton worked as a guest conductor at the Vienna Chamber Opera, and led productions here of "Le nozze di Figaro", Don Giovanni and "Rigoletto".

This led to a position at the the Saarland State Theater in Saarbrücken, Germany as associate conductor, where his responsibilies included conducting many standard works, such as "Die Entführung aus dem Serail", "Le nozze di Figaro", "Zar und Zimmermann", "La bohème" and "Aida". As a coach, he also worked intensively preparing productions of "Salome", "Lulu", "Mignon", "Lohengrin", "Johannes-Passion", "Turandot" and "Werther", among others.

At the festival in Bad Gandersheim, Germany in 2004 he led an experimental new production of Mozart's "Die Zauberflöte" specially arranged for nine musicians. This first-ever opera production in Gandersheim was well-received, and it was followed up in 2005 with an original work of Lawton's entitled "Mozart in Manhattan", which focussed on Lorenzo DaPonte's life in New York as a penniless poet and bonvivant in the decades which followed his collaboration with Mozart as an opera librettist in Vienna. "MiM" played nine performances and was invited to the Berlin Tertianum earlier in 2006.

His operatic work with the Deutsches Filmorchester is concert-oriented: the orchestra regularly accompanies opera galas; a special highlight in this genre was a collaboration in September 2005 with soprano Tatjana Lisnic and tenor Joseph Calleja, both young artists highly regarded at Vienna State Opera and the New York Met.