In normal circumstances, any opera company launching a new season with a double bill of Bartok and Schoenberg, followed by Tippett's The Knot Garden, would earn maximum points for bold, imaginative repertory. But Scottish Opera has been under serious threat of closure lately: it has managed to survive only by drastically reducing its programme over the next few years and disbanding its chorus. The company's priority should be to maximise box-office income - but, with the best will in the world, neither the Tippett nor this first pairing of Bluebeard's Castle and Erwartung is going to pull in the crowds in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

There was not even a full house for the opening night of the double bill, which was greeted respectfully rather than enthusiastically by the audience. Such a response seems about right. Standards are high in the pit: Richard Armstrong conducts the scores vividly and the huge orchestra required plays some demanding music expertly. What happens on the stage, however, is far less convincing. Both works depend on sharply focused vocal performances, but not one of Michele Kalmandi as Bluebeard, Andrea Szanto as Judith or Renate Behle as the solo protagonist in the Schoenberg project their roles with anything like the kind of intensity needed.

The Bartok is the more successful of the two, mainly because André Engel's production has a light touch that never undermines the psychological thrust of the work. Chantal de la Coste-Messelière's updated costume design dresses Bluebeard in a smart suit and tie, and Judith in a bridal gown. There's even a joke in the final scene, when Judith is invited to join the previous wives in a nice cup of tea.

But Erwartung is transferred from the dark, forbidding wood of the original - in which a woman searches for her lover, only to finally find his body - to a pastel-shaded motel room. She peers anxiously through the windows before dragging the man's corpse out from behind the bed, and so an elemental psychological study, a classic of expressionism, is reduced to soap-opera banality. Behle's generalised singing hardly helps, either.

· In rep until Saturday. Box office: 0141-332 9000. Then at Edinburgh Festival Theatre on October 21 and 23. Box office: 0131-529 6000