Scottish Opera won two awards at the Sunday Herald Culture Awards which took place at SWG3 in Glasgow on Thursday 12 July.
Former Scottish Opera Emerging Artist, Catherine Backhouse, won Best Musical Artist and John Liddell, Head of Costume, was presented with the Behind the Scenes Award.
In Scottish Opera’s 2017/18 Season, mezzo soprano Catherine was one of the Company’s Emerging Artists, and made her Scottish Opera debut as Annina in Verdi’s La traviata. She also sang the role of Henrietta in the Spring Opera Highlights tour and starred in Grace Notes. This new, 15-minute piece by the Company’s Composer in Residence Samuel Bordoli was based on the final pages on the novel of the same name by Bernard MacLaverty (named Best Writer at the Awards) who also wrote the libretto.
During his almost 35 years at Scottish Opera, John Liddell has worked on more than 200 mainstage productions, supervising the creation of thousands of costumes. In the last 24 months alone, John and his team have made almost 600 costumes for 11 mainstage productions set in a diverse array of historical periods from the 19th century French grandeur of La traviata to the modern minimalism of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Greek.
The Sunday Herald Culture Awards, now in its third year, is a major awards event celebrating the best of Scotland’s world-class artistic scene. There were more than 150 entries received across the award’s sixteen categories. A panel of leading names from the creative world selected the best of Scotland’s musicians, actors, visual artists, writers and events to recognise the national and international success being achieved by artists across all genres.