English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.
Conductor Oliver Zeffman has commissioned the very first opera for a socially distanced world, which is now available to watch exclusively on Apple Music. Eight Songs From Isolation has been written by eight leading composers, specifically for streaming - rather than live performance - and is the first opera written for a time when the performers were unable to meet in person.
Leading freelance musicians unite in Parliament Square to call for targeted support for colleagues in the arts and entertainment sector.
Duo Lewis Murphy (composer) and Laura Attridge (writer) have launched a charitable song project entitled Notes From Isolation. The resulting songs, featuring some of the UK's top singing talent, are being released online between August and October 2020 and can be enjoyed free of charge.
The Royal Opera House is thrilled to announce an exciting, wide-ranging new line-up for its autumn programme. For the first time, extraordinary performances will be accessible online for a global audience through livestreams and for socially distanced live audiences at our home in Covent Garden. In a global first, we present a new opera in hyper-reality, alongside repertory favourites from both artistic companies.
Some of the most famous and outstanding stars from the opera world are to take part in a very special evening from Wexford Festival Opera, including Aigul Akhmetshina, Joseph Calleja, Daniela Barcellona, Juan Diego Flórez, Igor Golovatenko, Ermonela Jaho, Sergey Romanovsky, and many more.
Following its successful launch in 2019, OperaStreaming streams nine operas on YouTube from the historic opera houses of Emilia-Romagna during the 2020-21 season, with fully-staged productions of Verdi's La traviata in October from Modena and Verdi'sOtello from Bologna in...
‘A brief history of song’ is the subtitle of the 2020 Oxford Lieder Festival (10th-17th October), which will present an ambitious, diverse and imaginative programme of 40 performances and events.
Bampton Classical Opera returns to the Baroque splendour of London’s St John’s Smith Square on November 6 with a concert performance of Gluck’s one-act opera The Crown, the first in the UK since 1987. The performance will also be filmed and available to watch on demand on the Bampton website from 9 November.
While many of us spent lockdown at home taking it a little easier, composer Andrew Synnott wrote an opera.
Owen Wingrave is part of the new Interim Season of 19 brand new events, all free to view online between September and December 2020.
The Arts Council has awarded innovative UK charity Music and Theatre For All (MTFA) a major new grant to develop three ambitious new projects in the wake of Covid 19.
English National Opera (ENO) will reopen the London Coliseum to socially distanced audiences on 6 and 7 November for special performances of Mozart’s Requiem. These will provide audiences with an opportunity to reflect upon and to commemorate the difficulties the nation has faced during the pandemic.
The Royal Opera House is proud to continue its curated #OurHouseToYourHouse programme into the autumn, bringing audiences the best of the ROH through a new series of Friday Premieres and cultural highlights.
After six months of closure, the Royal Opera House is thrilled to be opening its doors to the public as part of Open House London weekend, giving visitors a taste of one of the world’s most famous theatres for free.
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields is thrilled to announce re:connect - an eight concert series with live socially distanced audiences at its namesake church, St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The autumn concerts will take place at 5pm & 7:30pm on two Saturdays per month with guest artists including baritone Roderick Williams, soprano Carolyn Sampson and composer-conductor-pianist Ryan Wigglesworth performing a wide range of repertoire.
Music and poetry unite and collide across centuries, from the Medieval to the Enlightenment to the present day. This year, the Oxford Lieder Festival will present a thrilling and innovative programme comprising more than forty events streamed over eight days.
The English Concert with artistic director Harry Bicket is delighted to announce a series of concerts from 1-15 October 2020. The concerts take place in historic London venues with star soloists and will be performed and streamed live to a paying audience at 7pm GMT on each performance date. The programmes include first-class vocal and instrumental works from the two pillars of the English Baroque, covering different aspects of the repertoire.
Glyndebourne has announced plans for a ‘staycation’ series of socially-distanced indoor performances, starting on 10 October 2020.
The Royal Opera House is delighted to announce two packed evenings of opera and ballet, live from our stage in Covent Garden and available to view wherever you are in the world online.
For an opera company that boasts a $30-million endowment, and has scheduled funding efforts expected to bring that largesse to $50-million by 2007, its fiftieth anniversary of summer opera performances, plus $10-million more for capital improvements, the question comes up: Santa Fe Opera can afford top quality, but are they providing it? The answer seems to be, sometimes.
The just-concluding season offered one memorable success, Benjamin Britten's haunting 1945 tragedy Peter Grimes. Everything about it worked, from a spare but imaginative production to first rate singing and acting, with quality throughout the big cast. Anthony Dean Griffey, today's specialist in madman tenor roles, excelled in the name part and soprano Christine Brewer presented her role of schoolmarm Ellen Orford with luxurious tone and understated but effective acting. The huge choruses were magnificently done, much honor going to SFO music director Alan Gilbert for his leadership and choral director Gregory Buchalter. Considering the SFO chorus also had major duty in Turandot, and individual members (the opera apprentices) also took part in two evenings of scenes with piano, the young artists had a vigorous work-out over summer 2005. They came through brilliantly.
Mozart's youthful (he was 15) Lucio Silla enjoyed an elegant, stylized production and superb singing from sopranos Celena Shafer, Anna Christie and Susan Graham, as well as tenor Gregory Kunde, but the score holds little of interest, and none of Mozart's mature melodic genius. The adequate conductor was Bernard Labadie from Canada.
The much-booted Ainadamar, a 'new' (read revised) 'opera' (read play with music) by Osvaldo Golijov proved to be 75-minutes of tedium - excessively wordy; most action reported or recollected (difficult as a technique unless you are an ancient Greek master), and a score that dwelt in the land of Latin dance rhythms, but no such steps were ever taken. It was a weird evening considering the talent involved: composer Golijov, librettist David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) and director Peter Sellars. Maybe there was just too much talent to come up with one unified artistic vision. I found the effort diffuse and almost entirely ineffective, yet some critics gave it a rave. Perhaps one can charitably say, succes d'estime.
For the record, "Ainadamar" means something like "fountain of tears," in this case at Granada, Spain, where the gay revolutionary poet Garcia Lorca was shot by fascists in 1936 in the Spanish civil war. The central role of actress Margarita, an old, dissolute, lesbian friend to Garcia, was taken by the spruce, coiffed, scrubbed, prettily-singing Dawn Upshaw, in an example of serious mis-casting. With a different singer in the key role, matters might have improved. Since the entire effort was electronically amplified, often to excess, it is hard to say how much contribution was made by music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya, as compared to sound engineers Gustavo Santaolalla and Jeremy Flower. Better luck next time!
Turandot was treated as fairyland kitsch, with 80-year old Willa Kim's imaginative costumes and radical, young Douglas Fitch's goofy set of plastic steps and platforms, variously colored from lighting within their Plexiglas structures, and it was all fun - but it was also mainly nonsense. A routine cast and only so-so conducting from Gilbert contributed to a forgettable performance. I am not much of an advocate for Puccini's final opera - it's a lot of recycled tropes and ideas from the master's earlier, better days. There are more interesting ways for an opera company to spend its Puccini budget. Amidst all the hubbub was the sweet, little lyric Liu of Patricia Racette - the one element of Italianate opera over the evening. Jennifer Wilson, loud through not thrilling, took the title role but did not own it, while beefy Carl Tanner shouted a bit as the Calaf and seemed short on romance. Hard work!
And then there was Stefano Vizioli's take on Rossini's The Barber of Seville. It was frantic - over produced, over acted, over the top and with no memorable singing. Yes, Barber should be fun, but with prissy, unidiomatic conducting from Ken Montgomery and principal singers camping their way thru the show, little pleasure was found. Most surprising was Ana Maria Martinez as Rosina without low or top notes and entirely given over to mugging and dashing about the stage, no doubt as directed by Vizioli. Even last summer as Elvira in a splendid Don Giovanni at Santa Fe, Martinez was eliciting rave reviews from this and other critics, and she was a superb, vocally accomplished Fiordiligi in Cosi fan tutte the year before. Somewhere along the way Martinez seems to have gotten off the track; I hope she soon returns to the main line.
With its lovely new theatre, a first class orchestra, the ambience of Santa Fe abounding and fine mountain evenings to enjoy, not to mention its mounting assets and strong box office (by some accounts over 95% for this season), America's premiere summer opera festival needs to improve artistically. Glimmerglass is hard on the heels of Santa Fe, and often doing a better job. I wish them both great success, but the artistic vision in New Mexico needs to be sharpened.
Santa Fe repertory for 2006 is Carmen, Salome, The Magic Flute, the Massenet Cinderella and the American premiere of Thos. Ades's The Tempest, only the last two promising much of interest.
J. A. Van Sant
Santa Fe, New Mexico
© 2005