The Glasgow Grand Opera Society was an opera company based in Glasgow, Scotland. It was founded in 1906 and was wound up in the 1960s.
Charles Manners used profits from a successful season of his Moody-Manners Opera Company in Glasgow in 1906 to help create the Glasgow Grand Opera Society, under its first conductor R Hutton Malcolm.
For all of the 1930s Erik Chisholm, who had newly founded the Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music, became its musical director and conductor, giving many premieres of opera.[1] 1934 saw the British premiere of Mozart's Idomeneo, for which the scenery and costumes were designed and made by the Glasgow School of Art, which also provided the ballet, and in 1935 Berlioz's huge opera The Trojans was premiered for the first time outside France. Another premiere the next year was Beatrice and Benedict also by Berlioz and translated by the novelist Guy McCrone. In 1948 the Glasgow Grand Opera presented Eugene Onegin, which was then only rarely performed in Britain. In its Bizet Festival 1951, the Society included The Pearl Fishers, the first time in Britain that the opera had been performed in English. It performed principally in the city's Theatre Royal, followed by the Alhambra and the Kings, usually accompanied by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Its producers included Peter Ebert, Anthony Besch and Jack Notman.[2]
The Society ceased performances in the late 1960s once the new Scottish Opera company was firmly established by Sir Alexander Gibson, who had conducted the Society in 1954.