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.
![Portrait of Henry VIII after Hans Holbein the Younger, c. 1537-1547 [Source: Wikipedia]](http://www.operatoday.com/Workshop_of_Hans_Holbein_the_Younger_-_Portrait_of_Henry_VIII_-_Google_Art_Project.png)
BOSTON, MA (For Release 07.18.19) — One of the nation’s most adventurous opera companies, Odyssey Opera, begins its seventh season with a concert performance of Henry VIII (1883) by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns based on El cisma en Inglaterra (The schism in England) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca.
This kick-starts the company’s 2019-20 season featuring concert and staged operas about the great English dynasty of the 16th century: the Tudors. With libretto by Léonce Détroyat and Armand Silvestre, Henry VIII brings to life one of history’s most infamous love triangles featuring baritone Michael Chioldi as King Henry, soprano Ellie Dehn as Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and mezzo-soprano Hilary Ginther as Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn.
Dedicated to performing neglected works, Odyssey Opera resurrects this little known and intensely powerful work. It premiered in 1883 and received its North American premiere 100 years later in 1983. “ Henry VIII has all the ingredients of a spectacular grand opera,” says Gil Rose, Odyssey Opera’s Artistic and General Director. “It has a sensational historical subject and sweeping vocal melodies and rich orchestral writing. As often happens, much of the real meat of the opera was cut during the initial production. We are thrilled to be working with renowned Saint-Saëns scholar, Hugh MacDonald, to recreate Henry VIII as the composer intended. This is a performance that, for all intents and purposes, represents the world premiere!”
As Saint-Saëns’s fifth of 11 operas, Henry VIII focuses on the earlier phases of the monarch’s troubles with his wives and Rome. Henry is determined to divorce Catherine of Aragon in favor of the beautiful, ambitious Anne Boleyn. The opera contrasts this Great Affair of the English monarch against the public spectacle of the English court. Saint-Saens’s score brilliantly invokes an early Renaissance sensibility replete with period English melodies and Elizabethan court music while remaining firmly rooted in the French grand opera tradition.
Performing the title role of the second Tudor king, Henry VIII, is baritone Michael Chioldi. No stranger to Odyssey Opera, Chioldimade his company debut in the 2014 production of Verdi’s Un Giorno di Regno. According to Opera News, “ Michael Chioldi stood firmly at the center of the evening as Belfiore, the counterfeit king, possessing a powerful and gorgeously rich baritone voice ideally suited to Verdi.” He returned in 2015 for Odyssey’s productions of Vaughan Williams’s Sir John in Love and Jules Massenet’s Le Cid.Playing Catherine of Aragon is Ellie Dehn — her “melting yet clear soprano” impressed The New York Times when she portrayed Catherine with “eloquence and power” at Bard SummerScape 2012. Hilary Ginther brings her “substantial and richly colored instrument (Opera Now )” to the stage as the ill-fatedAnne Boleyn. Ginther was profiled in Opera Now (May 2016) as one of the Top 10 young American singers intent on taking the opera world by storm.
Following the season-opening concert, Odyssey Opera’s 2019-20 season continues with the fully-staged production of Maria, Regina d’Inghilterra (1843) by Giovanni Pacini (November 1 and 3, 2019). Odyssey ushers in 2020 with the world premiere of Arnold Rosner’s The Chronicle of Nine, a semi-staged co-production with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (February 1, 2020) followed by the fully-staged production of Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra (1815) by Rossini Neapolitan (March 13 and 15, 2020). The season ends with two operas from the 20th century: Gloriana (1953) by Benjamin Britten (April 11, 2020) and Merrie England (1902) by Edward German (June 5 and 7, 2020).
About Odyssey Opera
Founded in 2013 by artistic director/conductor Gil Rose, Odyssey Opera presents adventurous and eclectic works that affirm opera as a powerful expression of the human experience. Its world-class artists perform the operatic repertoire from its historic beginnings through lesser-known masterpieces to contemporary new works and commissions in varied formats and venues. Odyssey Opera sets standards of high musical and theatrical excellence and innovative programming to advance the operatic genre beyond the familiar and into undiscovered territory. Odyssey Opera takes its audience on a journey to places they’ve never been before. odysseyopera.org