Opera Scotland

Snow Maiden and Glasgow Grand

Posted 27 Oct 2014

Thanks to the generosity of Jim and Elaine Duncan, we now have photographs from the 1957 production of Rimsky-Korsakov's Snow Maiden by Glasgow Grand Opera. Their father, James Duncan, was singing Tsar Berendey, and is wearing an appropriately magnificent robe. Thank you, Jim and Elaine!

To see the images, click here then click on the images to expand them.

This Glasgow Grand production seems to have been the only time the opera has been performed in Scotland. Is this so? We'd welcome any more information about this or any other production.

A word about how we build the OperaScotland archive. For current and more recent performances we can call upon information from opera company managements. However it becomes more tricky when we are dealing with the 1960s, 1950s and earlier. Most of the information about older performances, including casting, comes initially from painstaking work to identify newspaper adverts and reviews. This is fundamental in cases where the records of performing companies are missing or otherwise unavailable. However, finding more detailed information about supporting roles and the production needs access to programmes.

For some years now, we have also been collecting old programmes to add to our existing archive, using them to check casts, scanning the covers and then uploading them to the OperaScotland website.

Building the site is obviously a labour-intensive task. Donation of material, funding or other assistance is always appreciated. If you have access to any programmes, posters or photographs of opera productions in Scotland and want to give them a good home, please get in touch with OperaScotland. We would be delighted to hear from you.