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.
As part of its annual programme of events, Boughton House in Northamptonshire hosts ‘A Passion for Opera’, a rare exhibition portraying the musical life of Lady Elizabeth Montagu (1743–1827) and the world of Georgian operatic culture.
Jump on a train from London St. Pancras and in an hour you will find yourself in the beautiful Northamptonshire countryside, crowned by the glorious Boughton House – seat of the Dukes of Montagu, Queensberry and Buccleuch, and one of the treasure houses of Britain. Once a Tudor residence, most of the current building is the work of Ralph Montagu, 1st Duke of Montagu and English ambassador to France, who in the late 17th century brought French architectural influences to the English countryside with the help of Huguenot craftsmen – hence the Versailles nickname.
Step inside and in addition to the sumptuous rooms and fine art collection featuring paintings by Gainsborough, Van Dyke and El Greco, you will find three rooms dedicated to Elizabeth Montagu’s love of all things operatic, testament to the fact that the 3rd Duchess of Buccleuch and Queensberry was the family’s great music enthusiast.
Through a collection of archival gems from the Montagu and Buccleuch family archives, the exhibition provides a rare opportunity to get a real sense of the role played by music – opera, in particular – within aristocratic circles between the late 18th and early 19th centuries both in London and Edinburgh, where she lived after her marriage to Henry Scott, 3rd Duke of Buccleuch.
Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Montagu, Duchess of Buccleuch, 1767 and Richard Scott, 10th Duke of Buccleuch
Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are greeted by an entertaining reproduction of an 18th century sedan chair (you’re welcome to sit inside it, should you fancy feeling a bit Georgian) in which ladies where taken to the opera at the time – while gentlemen would arrive separately either on horseback or by carriage.
A number of fascinating documents and artefacts are on display: her collection of scores of popular operas of the time, acquired as she attended their premieres and thus also serving as a historical record of the musical enthusiasms of her day as well as keyboard instruments of the period. Alongside these are beautifully handwritten family records of a range of musical activities, from the purchase of musical instruments and their transportation between family estates, to payments for her opera box subscriptions at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket (the main venue for Italian opera at the time, though the Duchess was also known to frequent the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane for English opera) and records of singing lessons with Italian masters arranged for her daughters.
Early Nineteenth-Century Monocular [Image © The College of Optometrists, London]
Some attention is also paid to the figure of Angelica Catalani, renowned soprano and diva at a time when the figure of the castrato is beginning to wane. One diary entry describes how she came for dinner with the family one night in February 1810 and entertained guests with her singing and ‘a performance of attitudes with a shawl’, posing as figures of classical history and mythology.
Other noteworthy pieces include a portrait by John Ainslie of the Italian soprano castrato Giuseppe Giustinelli, who became a friend and lived with the family in Dalkeith Palace for a number of years, hanging next to the painting by Thomas Gainsborough of the Duchess herself – while her portrait by Joshua Reynolds can be seen within Boughton House. Domenico Corri, another Italian émigré in Scotland, dedicated his famous singing manual, The Singer’s Preceptor, to the Duchess – and a copy of its first edition can be seen on display.
Further exhibits encompass early 19th century opera monoculars, a 1787 ‘opera fan’ decorated with a seating plan of subscribers to the opera season at the King’s Theatre where the Duchess’s box can be spotted alongside those of other titled gliteratti, as well as her remarkable collection of caricature prints by James Gillray, many of them with an operatic twist.
From collection of operatic scores including operas by Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi (1728–1804) and Antonio Sacchini (1730–1786)
The exhibition is a great example of what can be achieved through this kind of collaboration – in this case, between the Department of Music at the University of Southampton, the Royal College of Music, and the Buccleuch Living Heritage Trust, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). A unique opportunity to visit one of the finest country houses in England and to get a glimpse into Georgian operatic culture through a very personal lens: that of a notable 18th century opera buff.
Mahima Macchione
Boughton’s special exhibition will open to the public throughout August, during the House’s summer opening season. Visit: boughtonhouse.co.uk