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.
At a time when more people than ever are turning online to enjoy their favourite opera productions, the first-ever professional performance in English of The Veiled Prophet by Dublin-born composer, Charles Villiers Stanford, is now available to view on the RTÉ Player.
The project presented at last year’s Wexford Festival Opera in association with Heritage Music Productions, founded and produced by international pianist and broadcaster Una Hunt, was a momentous milestone in the quest to recover Irish opera from oblivion and was thus supported by a major grant from the Arts Council of Ireland. The opera was recorded live by RTÉ lyric fm for radio broadcast and was included as part of the European Broadcasting Union Premium Opera Series which is heard by millions of listeners across the globe. This is the first complete presentation to take place in more than 125 years, making it a ‘must-see’ for newcomers to opera and connoisseurs alike.
www.rte.ie/player/movie/
The opera has other Irish connections in addition to the composer as it is based on part of the enormously successful oriental romance, Lalla Rookh, by Irish poet and national songwriter, Thomas Moore. The production, conducted by David Brophy, was performed by a predominantly Irish cast including soprano Sinéad Campbell-Wallace, tenor Gavan Ring, mezzo-soprano Mairéad Buicke, and bass/baritone John Molloy. The title role is sung by the young Polish baritone, Simon Mechliński and the superb Wexford Festival Chorus is augmented by the Chorus from TU Dublin Conservatoire.
The NYC based Opera News Magazine hailed the opera: “Stanford’s sense of structure and his ear for orchestration are very strong.”
Producer Una Hunt said, “The reawakening of The Veiled Prophet after an absence of more than a century fulfills a personal dream in seeing this magnificent opera spring back to life. Its launch on the RTÉ Player means it can now be appreciated and enjoyed by audiences around the world.”
Aodán Ó Dubhghaill, Managing Director, RTÉ lyric fm, Orchestras, Quartet & Choirs, commented, “As well as being a versatile pianist who has performed concertos with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and the Ulster Orchestra, Una Hunt is a leading authority in the field of historic Irish music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. RTÉ lyric fm has worked closely with Una on many projects, across many platforms including radio broadcasts, CDs, books, documentaries and features, to create awareness of the wonderful music-making that took place on the island of Ireland during those centuries. We were delighted when Una approached us to get involved in her latest project, the first-ever performance in English of The Veiled Prophet by Dublin-born composer, Charles Villiers Stanford in performance at last year’s Wexford Festival Opera and we have no doubt that you will enjoy the fruits of her work for many years to come.
David McLoughlin, CEO of Wexford Festival Opera added, “Wexford Festival Opera is built on the artistic foundations of presenting rare and unjustly neglected opera works to national and international audiences, illustrated by it previously winning the award for Best Rediscovered Work at the International Opera Awards. In recent years it has also pioneered, in association with RTÉ, the wider dissemination of opera performances by way of live streaming and web download. Wexford was therefore honoured to have been the location for the staging of this rediscovered opera work of great Irish and international significance. We are equally pleased that one of the highlights of last year’s Festival will be available to view and enjoy by audiences around the world on the RTÉ Player, similar to some of Wexford’s other recent stagings.”
Very few professional performances have been given of Charles Villiers Stanford’s operas in the last century, and many other parts of his musical outlook remain neglected. Mostly remembered these days for his late-Victorian church music, the Anglo-Irish composer enjoyed a full and varied career. Indeed, there is much more to the Dublin-born Stanford (1852-1924) than most modern listeners realise, and in particular, his symphonies, concertos and Irish Rhapsodies are a joy to discover. Stanford was also a prolific opera composer, but recognising the hopelessness of pursuing an operatic career at home, he turned to Germany and it was in Hanover that the first of his ten operas, The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, was premiered in 1881.
Sarah Ryder, Assistant Commissioning Editor, Documentary & Arts at RTÉ also commented, “It’s a real honour for RTÉ to partner with Una Hunt and the brilliant people at Wexford Festival Opera to bring another very special WFO production to audiences in Ireland and overseas on the RTÉ Player. More than ever, in these worrying times, we are seeing how music and the arts are bringing joy and solace to people, and we hope that this gorgeous production of The Veiled Prophet will bring much-needed pleasure and inspiration to many, many households in the weeks and months ahead.”
There are two other WFO productions still available to view on the RTÉ Player, Il bravo by Saverio Mercadante (2018) (https://www.rte.ie/player/find?q=il%20bravo) and Dorilla in Tempe by Antonio Vivaldi (2019) (https://www.rte.ie/player/find?q=dorilla).
Select scenes are also available on the Festival’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/WexfordFestivalOpera