Opera Scotland

Boris Godunov 1991Kirov Opera, Leningrad

Read more about the opera Boris Godunov

The Edinburgh Festival opera programme in 1991 was dominated by visits by the two great Soviet companies. The Bolshoi from Moscow had enjoyed a ground-breaking success in the 1990 visit to Glasgow's year of culture with unusual works by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, followed by a stop at Edinburgh with a Prokofiev piece. They now returned to Edinburgh with more Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.

1991 was also the year that the Kirov came with a special programme in which they surveyed all of Musorgsky's operatic work, including the fragments of his uncompleted operas.

It may seem strange that Boris should have been done in concert, but then the company's recent new production had been a joint effort with Covent Garden by the film director Andrei Tarkovsky. Already seen in London, it was therefore familiar to the metropolitan critics and had also been televised in the UK. The opera chosen for he only full staging was therefore Khovanshchina. Fortunately this Boris cast did include as Marina the most important discovery of this Festival, the superb mezzo Olga Borodina.