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.
Kurt Streit is singing Bazajet in all performances of Handel’s Tamerlano at the Royal Opera House, London. Placido Domingo, who was to have sung five of the seven performances, pulled out suddenly due to illness.
Since this will be Streit’s debut in this role, it’s daunting. He ends run as The Marquis in Prokofiev’s The Gambler this week and starts Tamerlano next week, so he’s singing two major roles in two productions, back to back.
Streit’s facing quite a challenge. Barely an hour before the premiere of The Gambler, I asked him if he was bothered by first night nerves. “It all has to do with how well rehearsed the production is”, he said. Although he wasn’t scheduled to sing Bajazet until mid-March, Streit is experienced and very professional. He’s jumped into roles at short notice before, though taking on such a big, new role in such unexpected circumstances is quite a feat.
“Rehearsals are critical”, says Streit. “Long ago”, he adds, “I used to have fun in rehearsals, and get serious for performances, but I realized that there was a better way. Instead, I decided to think of rehearsals as seriously as performance, so there was a more consistent build-up towards creating the character. Nowadays, I’m always singing right from the start. I don’t mark anymore. The voice and bodywork grow from the music straight from the beginning.”
“When it’s all worked out in rehearsal, the voice is where it wants to be. So much goes gone into building the character that the role comes naturally. These days, my mantra is that there’s no real difference between rehearsals and performance, they flow together”.
Streit has sung many Handel roles but this is his first Tamerlano and his first Bajazet. How does he find his way? “I work with the nuts and bolts, reading the score and libretto carefully. I try to figure out the “arrows”, finding directions to motives and actions. Who wants what, from whom and why. What’s the character projecting to the public, and what’s his private image? What makes the role distinct”.
“Bajazet comes from a long line of kings. He’s so aristocratic that he has trouble with the idea that he’s been defeated by Tamerlano who once was a nomadic shepherd. He’s so stubborn that he can’t adapt. Unlike most characters, he doesn’t have an arc, he doesn’t develop. So all he can think of is death.”
“Tamerlano is the villain in Bajazet’s eyes, but at least Tamerlano has the ability to change the way he thinks. Bahazet assumes he thinks for everyone else. “I speak for my daughter”, he says, expecting her to take poison”.
When Streit sang the Marquis in The Gambler, he was able to make a fundamentally unsympathetic role seem almost human. Gamblers were, in Prokofiev’s account, shallow. But shallowness doesn’t make great music, which is why that opera came to life orchestrally only in the final act. Streit had to expand the character by his acting, since Prokofiev’s spare, experimental score didn’t give much to work with. “The Marquis is trying to hide his feelings”, says Streit. “I had to find those physical things that gave him away inspite of himself”.
For Streit, opera is drama, and acting is part of a singer’s job. He likes “thinking roles” like Aschenbach in Death in Venice, or even Emilio in Partenope which he sang in Vienna last year. One critic said, “If only there were Oscars for the art of acting in opera”, a sentiment understood by those who appreciate singers like Streit and John Tomlinson whose acting methods impressed him so much while they were working on The Gambler.
Tamerlano will be directed for the Royal Opera House by Graham Vick. “It’s good when directors reach out to singers and work together to reach deeper levels in a piece”, says Streit. He’s worked with directors like Christof Loy and Claus Guth, who “don’t treat singers like puppets on strings”. Even concert performances of opera work best when the singers have previous experience from full stagings. “We remember what we’ve learned from good directors”.
Striet is creating his first Bajazet in unusual circumstances. His approach will, naturally, be very different from Placido Domingo’s, because they come from different backgrounds. The memory of Domingo’s Bajazet (from past performances and the DVD) will stay in the minds of many in the audience. Even today, audiences attuned to late 19th century grand opera need to adjust to a true baroque aesthetic. Streit made his name in baroque and in Mozart, so he’ll have something different to bring to the role. Given the unexpected circumstances in which he’s taken on the part, he deserves respect.
Anne Ozorio