Scottish Opera's new director of music, the Italian Francesco Corti, may not always have the English vocabulary he wants to express his thoughts, but he says some very interesting things.

At one point in our conversation, as he explains the thinking behind the first season for which he shares responsibility with general director Alex Reedijk, he talks passionately about the role of a national company with the express remit to bring opera to the people of Scotland. "If anyone can do this," he exclaims of one extension of the company's work, "we can do it. It is our job." Speaking of another major show in the season, he comments: "We are the most appropriate company to do that. It is our daily bread."

It is, frankly, impossible to imagine Corti's predecessor, Sir Richard Armstrong, talking in these terms, but from Corti's perspective it makes sense. The idea of a national opera company would be absurd in the birthplace of opera, where every major city has its own company and theatres such as La Scala in Milan are synonymous in the popular imagination with the very highest standards in the artform. Having got his Italian head round the concept, however, it seems Corti has embraced the idea as only an outsider could - especially one for whom opera is mother's milk. After the recruitment of Reedijk to manage the company, this looks like more good news for Scottish Opera.

It is becoming equally clear that Maestro Corti was being involved in the musical life of the nation long before his appointment to the post. When he made his UK debut, conducting the revival of David McVicar's acclaimed production of Madama Butterfly, this newspaper's music critic was first into print exclaiming: here's the man to fill the podium Armstrong has vacated.

But Michael Tumelty was voicing a thought that had occurred elsewhere. At this year's Edinburgh International Festival, Corti will make his debut as musical director of the company with a production of Bedrich Smetana's The Two Widows, a major plank of EIF director Jonathan Mills's second programme, which explores the new Europe and its outer fringes. These things are not short in the planning and it transpires that the venture was under discussion when Corti was around to conduct Butterfly (or, as he puts it, "when I was just working as a conductor").

Although Corti has conducted Smetana's warhorse The Bartered Bride several times in Germany, where he has spent much of his career, The Two Widows is as new to him as it will be to most people. The co-production with EIF will use David Pountney's English translation and, next to Karol Szymanowski's King Roger, might appear to be the lighter side of Mills's staged opera offerings - but, says Corti, it is a very sophisticated piece of work. "It is very melodic, with very good music - a late work, sparer and more efficient. A clever choice for EIF."

Corti points out that the second half of the nineteenth century spawned few comic operas of quality. Smetana produced a piece that is focused on the emotions of the two widows, where the music works with dramaturgy throughout. It may be an "easy" opera to listen to, but it is far from easy to make work.

It comes in to the company's repertoire at Glasgow's Theatre Royal in the autumn, but it is not the first show in Corti's first season. That honour belongs to another rarity, The Secret Marriage by Domenico Cimarosa, a masterpiece from the end of the eighteenth century that is famous in Italy but less well known in the UK. The production is one of debuts: it is the first Secret Marriage in the history of Scottish Opera, and will be the debut in the pit of Scottish conductor Garry Walker. Sung in English, it will also be the main-stage debut of director Harry Fehr, whose small-scale touring production of Cinderella has been very much admired.

"Almost Mozart" is how Corti describes the opera, but Cimarosa was much more prolific, producing a huge number of works of opera buffa, with Il matrimonio segreto the acknowledged pinnacle. A son of Naples, he wrote the piece while in Vienna at the invitation of Leopold II and it is, says Corti, definitive of the taste in Vienna at the time. Cimarosa's work does not have the depth of Mozart, he admits, and the story is not complicated, but it is very demanding music. In the season it will be a partner to the greatest Italian tragedy, Verdi's La Traviata, in a new co-production with Welsh National Opera. Remarkably, this is the first of two shows directed by David McVicar in the season announced today. The Scot is now one of the hottest names in international opera, and to have two of his productions within months is a coup for Scottish Opera.

Traviata, which will not be seen in Wales until 2009, opens on October 30 and stars Scottish Opera debutante Carmen Giannattasio as Violetta. The other McVicar is also a sure-fire hot ticket: a production of Cosi fan tutte he created for Opera National de Rhin in Strasbourg, which has also been seen in Spain. Reedijk talks of having a "duty of care" to the top 15 in the opera repertoire, but his knowing smile confirms a firm interest in box-office receipts. For him, McVicar is one of the best storytellers in the business and the cast of the Mozart includes Scots soprano Marie McLaughlin in the role of Despina, which she played in Strasbourg. The conductor will be Swede Tobias Ringborg.

Corti himself returns to the pit for a new production of Massenet's Manon in the spring. This nineteenth-century classic is new to both Scottish Opera and the conductor but it is a big piece with plenty of passion and sensuality that appeals to modern audiences in a way few operas achieve. That it is a star-quality show was amply illustrated by the fuss that surrounded the appearance of Anna Netrebko, the soprano of our time, opposite Roberto Alagna in the Vienna State Opera production last year.

This new production is by the Montreal team of Renaud Doucet and Andre Barbe and will be another storytelling creation working entirely in the service of the music, showcasing the handsome young people on stage. Anne Sophie Duprels and Paul Charles Clarke are ScotOp's couple, with Benjamin Bevan as Lescaut, and a very theatrical evening is promised. One of the things Corti and Reedijk have in common is a mistrust of "concept" or "director's" opera.

The opera orchestra's occasional Sunday afternoon concerts at St Andrew's in the Square in Glasgow continue, with Corti taking charge of the first one, which will be devoted to Mozart and Schubert, on September 28 as part of the Merchant City Festival. There will also be a concert performance of Bellini's I Puritani in the City Hall next April. Another first, it gives the company the opportunity to tackle a crucial bel canto work in the form in which it possibly works best. Corti describes the initiative as "his job as an Italian director of Scottish Opera".

"We have to put more repertoire in front of the audience," he says. "I Puritani is not played frequently because, staged, it is not interesting - but the music is so great. This concert is my thank-you for being Italian."