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.
Writer Frank Cadenhead discusses Wuthering Heights, the nearly-finished new operatic endeavor by composer Frédéric Chaslin. Cadenhead recently traveled to Valenica, Spain, where Chaslin and librettist Paula Heil Fisher are hard at work on the piece.
Frédéric Chaslin has, for some years, been juggling with the title Composer-slash-conductor. Appearing on major podiums around the world, this Paris-born maestro is looking to find a better balance for his two ambitions. Composer/conductors are more common than you might think - Bernstein, Furtwangler, and Mahler readily come to mind - and the list is extensive. A few years ago, Esa-Pekka Salonen took a sabbatical from his Los Angeles duties to devote the maximum time to his opuses. Others try to get something done during summer vacations.
Chaslin is looking to make a major mark as composer as he nears completion of his opera, Wuthering Heights, large parts of which he recorded Mid-September in Valencia, Spain. Chaslin, often composing on stolen weekends at his houseboat on the Seine, is looking to increase his composition time and is in the process of thinning his future appearances. “Look at (Lorin) Maazel and his first opera, 1984, which I rather liked,” he argued. “Now that he is in his 70s, did he wait too long to start? I’m now in my mid-40s and when do I start getting serious? Now I am in the process of trimming my future schedule to give me more time to compose.”
His new opera is unapologetically neo-romantic. He is on record with his belief that Twentieth Century classical music went off the rails into serialism and dense atonality. Even though he was, for a time, associated with Pierre Boulez (another composer/conductor) and the Paris contemporary music group Ensemble Intercontemporain, his book, ”Music in Every Sense,” takes modern music to task. “Music should always engage the audience,” he emphasized to me. The music for Wuthering Heights is so accessible that there was some debate at the inception of the project on whether to frame it as a “musical.” After most all has been committed to paper, he clearly sees it as operatic in every sense and the scope and drama of what was heard clearly support that view.
He has found a passionate advocate of the Emily Bronte novel in his librettist. Paula Heil Fisher is a writer, Broadway producer of musicals, filmmaker and head of Millennial Arts Productions who is developing this particular project. Clearly devoted to the classic novel of love and revenge she describes reading the novel as a child - one of her first novels - and the strong impact it had. She sees the author in all of the strong characters, an oblique protest against the limited power for women of Bronte’s time.
In the almost two hours of of music recorded in the spectacular Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, Chaslin found a “responsive, eager” house orchestra, the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valencia. Built with the help of Lorin Maazel, finishing his last season as conductor of the New York Philharmonic and Valencia’s current musical director, the top young talent (the average age is around 30) was selected from auditions around the world. This orchestra, only two years old, has already established itself as one of the more important in Europe.
Frédéric Chaslin
Young too are the leads, both of whom are ready for their close up. Long haired lanky American tenor Andrew Richards seems an ideal heartthrob as Heathcliff playing alongside the stunning young soprano, Olga Peretyatko, as Cathy. Both have already made waves on major stages, are very committed to this project and are names to note.
What chunks were heard during the two days at the recording session would certainly suggest the complete opera would likely qualify as a major event on the world’s musical calendar. The mature Cathy’s aria, the love duet with Heathcliff and the haunting music accompanying the Moor’s Chorus (with the London Philharmonia Chorus imported for the occasion) were particularly well-crafted and moving.
While the particularly lush orchestration during the arias will certainly be balanced in the recording studio, one can only wonder (as some of the singers do) how the balance will be achieved in the opera house. The reported three hours plus of music also might need some scissor application. However, walking to lunch, this critic, who has sat through uncounted new operas, was surprised to find him whistling a tune from the music. How often has that happened? I can’t remember the last time.
[Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in PlaybillArts. It is reprinted with permission of Millennial Arts Productions, the rights holder.]