This," says Derek Clark, tapping the small mountain of scores and libretti piled up on his desk in Scottish Opera's headquarters, "is a crazy idea." It is also, he adds quickly, "a brilliant idea".

Clark, Scottish Opera's head of music, is referring to Five:15, the project that has teamed five authors with five composers and a collective remit to produce a series of five 15-minute operas.

The creative teams include some big names in their own fields, and the line-up features writers, authors and poets Ian Rankin, Bernard MacLaverty, Alexander McCall Smith, Ron Butlin and Suhayl Saadi, paired respectively with composers Craig Armstrong, Gareth Williams, Stephen Deazley, Lyell Cresswell and Nigel Osborne.

Clark is the linchpin. All scores and libretti have come through him and he has effective editorial control over writers and composers. He will also conduct the performances of all five operas. He alone knows everything that each of the teams has been up to, and how they worked. If anyone is qualified to describe the project as "crazy", it's Derek Clark.

"I've been around a while now," says Clark, the opera company's head of music for more than a decade, "and I've been round the block a few times. But I've done nothing like this. This is totally new to me and the whole notion of doing five new operas in one evening, even if they're all short, is just a little bit crazy.

"But that idea is also brilliant, fantastic even, because, rather than investing in one long piece, we are giving five times as many composer/librettist teams the opportunity to come up with new and challenging work. It's an important step for all of us."

And it's not just the volume of music and words that will pour off the stage in Oran Mor at the end of the month, when the operas are premiered, which represents the challenge, he says. It's the whole concept.

Most of the authors have no significant familiarity with, or experience of, writing words to be set to music (as at least one of them discovered with some shock). And not all of the composers, despite their vast and varying experience, have a track record in writing music within an operatic form. Nigel Osborne, whose opera The Electrification of the Soviet Union, put him on the map, is a striking exception. And the youngest of the composers, Gareth Williams, is still a student at the RSAMD, though he has an opera (Love in the Blue Corner, premiered last summer in the academy) under his belt.

Scottish Opera had no template to offer the teams as to how they might proceed: there is no precedent, though they did have the experience of dramaturg Michael McCarthy from Music Theatre Wales to guide them. Before turning the teams loose, the company set them some parameters. They could produce a 15-minute opera which was an entity. Or they could produce a number of short scenes which might lend themselves to future development.

The composers were set rather more strict parameters, explained Clark. "The number of orchestral players they could use would be based loosely around the size of an ensemble used for Britten's chamber operas: about 13-15 players."

And the results? Four of the five teams have produced a 15-minute opera as an entity. One - Dream Angus, by Deazley/McCall Smith, with director Ben Twist - is subtitled Scenes from an Opera and is clearly intended for further development.

As for the sound world of the four operas, governed by the limited instrumentation, Clark is delighted and fascinated by the results. "Considering that by and large it's the same pool of players they're all using, all five pieces have completely different sound worlds. That's something I perhaps should have been expecting, but was surprised by."

Any turkeys? "We certainly don't have five turkeys. I'm not even sure if we have one turkey. We have five teams who have found their own solutions to the challenges set by opera. None of them really breaks down into arias and so on. And there is not a single love duet, which is quite nice.

"We have five very different pieces that will provoke different reactions - that's just human nature. But we have five viable operas, with five very strong stories. They don't necessarily have a conventional plot, but they all have a drive through them in that they tell their stories effectively. The narrative drive in all five is very strong."

As the man in charge, Clark confesses himself "slightly wary" of exercising editorial control over the writers, as their craft is not his field, though he has pointed out to them the odd tongue-twister of a line that will be difficult to deliver.

With the composers he has been pragmatic, pointing out word-setting that doesn't work musically, music that doesn't lie comfortably for the voice, won't be heard with the accompanying orchestration, will put unnecessary pressure on a singer's voice, and so on.

Clark and his own team at Scottish Opera have taken care to ensure that the singers who will star in the operas are seasoned, highly experienced troupers, capable of coping with the challenges and difficulties new contemporary work can set. They all have Scottish Opera associations.

Clearly he is thrilled with the results, and is convinced that, such is the variety of the end products, there will be something for everyone in a highly unusual night.

But where, with singers and stage set to be accommodated, will they put the Orchestra of Scottish Opera in Oran Mor, a venue without a pit?

The set, explained Clark, has been designed by Andrew Storer to incorporate the orchestra and be highly portable.

"Imagine a doughnut. That's the set, and the orchestra is in the ring."

There, too, will be Derek Clark, conducting all five new works - and he is the one performer who doesn't get a break all night.

"It will be a tiring evening for me. The gear-changing across five very different operas will be interesting."


Five:15 has performances at Oran Mor, Glasgow, on Feb 29, 7.30pm; Mar 1, 3pm and 7.30pm; Mar 2, 3pm; and The Hub, Edinburgh, Mar 8, 3pm and 7.30pm; Sun 9, 3pm.

  • Tomorrow: Two Irishmen and a lullaby. Michael Tumelty meets one of the opera teams - novelist Bernard MacLaverty and young composer Gareth Williams.

Derek Clark gives a thumbnail sketch of the five new operas.


The King's Conjecture

Music by Gareth Williams, libretto by Bernard MacLaverty.


"Based on a historical event in the 1570s where the king, for purposes of experiment, placed a deaf-and-dumb wet nurse in charge of a baby (two babies in the historical record) on Inchkeith, furnished them with all their bodily requirements and left them there for 10 years to see what sort of language the child would speak at the end of the period. I was very excited when I got this score. Gareth is the youngest of the composers and he has really seized the opportunity with both hands. With a deaf mute as the central character, we're in similar territory to the Ghost in Britten's Turn of the Screw, where you have to put words into their mouths. A dramatic story and a dramatic score. This is a good 15 minutes."


The Queens of Govan

Music by Nigel Osborne/ Wajahat Khan, libretto by Suhayl Saadi.


"Set in Govan, today, the opera explores the character of a young Asian girl who is struggling to come to terms with different aspects of her background: Asian and Western cultures. The music is a strange and fascinating mixture of western and Indian elements, and, as an integral part of the piece, musician Wajahat Khan, who will actually be onstage playing the sarod (a stringed instrument)."


Dream Angus

Music by Stephen Deazley, libretto by Alexander McCall Smith.


A love story. "I'm a great Alexander McCall Smith fan, especially of the humanity in his writing. It's in this piece, too, and has been captured in Stephen's music. It's an interesting score. He's left out a lot of the upper instruments, but, for all that, it's light where it needs to be. Dramatically, it's the lightest of the operas and, we hope, will raise a smile: it has a chorus of pigs and some beautiful lyrical music which I find quite moving."


The Perfect Woman

Music by Lyell Cresswell, libretto by Ron Butlin.


"Set in the present and based on a short story by Nathanial Hawthorne, the opera takes place in a laboratory with a scientist who is married to a woman with a blemish on her cheek. He intends to remove it. She does not share her husband's determination. It's very topical and is about the use and abuse of power. Lyell's music is very dense and this is the toughest one for the audience in terms of musical language, but it presents a very powerful, meaty, ethical drama, with an element in the libretto that is almost circus-like. We'll have to work hard here to get the voices through."


Gesualdo

Music by Craig Armstrong, libretto by Ian Rankin.


Drawn from the life of Gesualdo, the great sixteenth-century, late-Renaissance composer who had his wife and her lover slaughtered, and wrote some of the most beguilingly beautiful music ever conceived. A recipe for a Rankin bloodbath?

"Craig and Ian discussed and dismissed a contemporary crime opera, then went for this. It begins in the aftermath of the murder and has a tragic ending as the composer is helped into suicide. Definitely the darkest of the five operas."