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.
![Ignite [Photo courtesy of Wigmore Hall]](http://www.operatoday.com/Ignite_mainimage2.png)
What do you get if you cross Benjamin Britten, ‘one-page scores’, an innovative performing ensemble and ‘Wigmore Learning’ — the Wigmore Hall’s imaginative outreach programme which aims to provide access to chamber music and song through innovative creative programmes, online resources and events?
The answer is Woodwose, a pioneering new community chamber opera by composer Kerry Andrew, inspired by Britten’s folk songs and using tales collected from the diverse local community of the London borough of Westminster. Directed by Hazel Gould, designed by Ruth Paton, with musical direction by Isabelle Adams, the opera will be performed at the Wigmore Hall on 19th July, featuring tenor Andrew Kennedy alongside a community cast of over 150 drawn from across Westminster.
The work was created with the participants. Taking the idea of a folk-song collection, Kerry Andrew has worked with the children involved to collect lullabies, play songs and explore characters — particularly those who might create fear or consternation. The folk material has been woven into the opera in the way that Britten himself quoted and integrated folk song, nursery rhyme and children’s song in his works — for example, in the opera The Turn of the Screw or the children’s opera The Little Sweep.
Leading the musical performance of the opera will be the musicians of Ignite, Wigmore Learning’s resident ensemble, who will also be creating some of the accompanying music. The ensemble will have to work with flexibility and be able to respond quickly to different musical situations; the accompaniments will be devised in just one workshop with the children!
Ignite were formed by Wigmore Learning, when leader and vibraphone player, Jackie Walduck, approached them with the idea creating a Learning Ensemble to work with a broader range of community groups, including children in Westminster hospitals, young people who may be in vulnerably housing or have refugee status, or who suffer from austistic spectrum disorders. Clearly Ignite rise to considerable challenges and are prepared to take risks in their workshops; the projects culminate in a performance by the participants alongside musicians from Ignite. In the summer of 2012 all of these groups, many of whom may be excluded from regular arts provision, came together to perform a new piece commissioned from composer Param Vir, World-Filling Light, as part of a large-scale community project calledBeautiful Sounds.
Two movements from World-Filling Light were included in a short concert entitled, ‘Aperitif’, given by Ignite on Tuesday 4 th June at the Wigmore Hall. ‘Jewels in the Sky’ was notable for its Stravinskian rhythmic structures and overall form, while ‘World Filling Light’ drew attention to the striking range of colours and timbres the ensemble explore; here double bass player, Lucy Shaw, creating a wonderfully sonorous line. In the opening work, ‘Kalavati’ — which was created after Amjad Ali Khan met with Ignite in 2011 and sang them a raga which the ensemble developed through improvisation — James Barralet’s haunting cello glissandi were followed by a sequence of technically assured soloistic sections which confirmed the group’s combination of artistry, imagination and virtuosity.
Clarinettist Vicky Wright, took the lead in Martin Butler’s How Long, here receiving its world premiere in the presence of the composer. Completing the ensemble was flautist Daniel Parkin, whose timbre was by turns pure and gleaming, then shaded and dark. ‘Forest Overture’ and ‘Winter to Spring — the opening and closing movements of Woodrose — were also heard, the buoyant conclusion of the latter suggesting that the opera reaches a joyful, uplifting conclusion.
Ignite musicians combine high calibre performance with strong communication skills. Walduck described their ambitions: “Our aim has always been to explore the boundaries of musical interaction and interpretation that are inherent in chamber music performance practice. As an improviser, I was keen to make improvisation central to our work. Doing so allows musical interaction to encompass real-time creation of material, and extends ‘interpretation’ to choices of pitch, rhythm, ornamentation, musical role. Interaction is at the heart of the performance, but also shape, the musical structure. Working from one-page scores, in which some material is given, and musical development is suggested, enables us to work with musical frameworks beyond pure improvisation, so that we can create sudden shifts in material, plan detailed textures, and work with interpretation at the ‘architectural’ level (in the way in which a string quartet might approach a Beethoven movement, for example). It also ensures that we work with a range of materials, harmonic disciplines, and importantly, dovetail artistically with Wigmore Hall.”
Woodrose is performed at the Wigmore Hall on Friday 19th July at 6.30pm. Find out more at: http://www.wigmore-hall.org.uk/woodwose-a-community-chamber-opera
Claire Seymour