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.
![Laurence Cummings [Photo courtesy and copyright Sheila Rock]](http://www.operatoday.com/Laurence%2520Cummings%2C%2520C1%2520%2528Sheila%2520Rock%2529.png)
The small but perfectly formed Grosvenor Chapel in London’s exclusive Mayfair was the venue last Monday night for a programme of Handel vocal and instrumental music of considerable quality — if minimal quantity.
The hour-long concert, catchily entitled “Castrati to Countertenors”, preceded the now-annual benefit Dinner which helps fund the following year’s London Handel Festival. As hors d’oeuvres, it must have been ideal — piquant orchestral playing combined with some fuller vocal flavours courtesy of the excellent London Handel Players (is there a finer small baroque band in this city?) and young countertenor Christopher Lowrey who deservedly won the Festival’s Michael Oliver Prize in 2010.
The programme consisted of the overtures to and well-known airs and arias from Saul and Rodelinda: “O Lord, whose mercies numberless”, “Impious wretch”, “Dove Sei, amato bene”, and “Vivi, tiranno!”, together with a scintillating performance of the meatier Concerto Grosso, Op. 3 No. 5 in D Minor (HWV 316), which showed off this small band’s command of colour, dynamic and pinpoint accents. The Players were led with real joie de vivre and musicality by their Musical Director Laurence Cummings from the harpsichord/keyboard. Young Lowrey, we were warned, was suffering from a chest infection but there was little sign of this (apart perhaps from some short-breathed lines and restrained ornamentation) in his performance as he offered some real drama combined with concise, accurate coloratura. He seemed most at home with the material from Rodelinda and this confirmed the promise he showed in 2009 at the Festival/Britten International Opera School production of Alessandro. He is an undoubted talent in the ever-increasing pool of excellent young countertenors graduating now.
The concert series continues this Autumn with the traditional Christmas-time Messiah on the 2nd December at St. George’s Hanover Square and in 2011 we can look forward to performances of Rodelinda (fully staged), Saul, the St Matthew Passion, Comus, the Magnificat and many other concerts and recitals — not forgetting the increasingly important Singing Competition Final in April. Full details can be found at the LHF’s web site.
Sue Loder © 2010