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.
This summer, Guildhall School of Music & Drama’s opera double bill has been transformed from the physical to the digital stage, with the creative team and artists from across the School bringing the productions to life from their homes using digital technology. It is now available to stream for free until Wednesday 1 July 2020.
A 20th-century reimagining of one of the earliest English operas Dido and Aeneas - Purcell’s tragic love story featuring the famous aria Dido’s Lament - is contrasted with Respighi’s La bella dormente nel bosco, a witty take on the Sleeping Beauty story. The School’s production would have been the UK premiere of Respighi’s rarely performed work. All students, staff and guest artists have been working from wherever they have been living during the lockdown, across at least 14 countries and four continents.
From home, the opera’s cast and chorus have captured and filmed their own performances under the virtual direction of director Olivia Fuchs and movement director Victoria Newlyn, which have then been edited by the filmmaker Karl Dixon. Guildhall School instrumentalists have recorded their parts for a multi-track recording of the orchestral scores co-ordinated by conductor and Head of Opera Dominic Wheeler.
The visions of designer takis and lighting designer Jake Wiltshire have been brought to life by Guildhall School staff and students using a range of innovative technology. A 3D model of Silk Street Theatre, produced using cutting-edge lidar scanning technology, was used as the basis for the production under the expert guidance of BILD Studios. All of the behind-the-scenes work to create a regular opera production at Guildhall - construction, costume, lighting, props, scenic art, sound and video production - have been translated to the digital world.
Dominic Wheeler, Head of Opera at Guildhall School says: “ When we started this project, we had to reinvent our way of working so quickly that we felt it would put too much pressure on everyone involved to share the full finished result publicly. However, whilst the process has certainly been a healthy challenge, it has also been exciting and eye-opening. We feel that the students’ enthusiasm and commitment to telling stories meaningfully in such difficult circumstances transcends all the challenges they’ve faced, and makes us proud to share their work with everyone .”
Collaborative and interdisciplinary work is a priority across Guildhall School, and this project has integrated work by more than 100 artists from the Opera, Production Arts, Vocal and Music departments, as well as Guildhall Live Events - an innovative new department set up to act as a conduit between the professional artistic, creative and entertainment industries and the world-class educational practises of Guildhall School.
Dan Shorten, Creative Director of Guildhall Live Events says : " This wonderful cross-School collaborative project is an excellent example of Guildhall’s resourcefulness and ability to adapt. Having firm connections to industry, through initiatives such as Guildhall Live Events, allows for current technical innovation and developments to be instantly implemented into curriculum delivery, and conversely allows our students to work with, and push, our industry partners and the way we work with them commercially.”
The Production Arts department at Guildhall School has long been recognised as providing some of the most innovative vocational training in the UK and beyond, and the School is embracing this chance for students to learn cutting-edge skills and new technology working practises which are vital in today’s theatre and live events industry.
The digital opera double bill is available to watch until 1 July here .
Purcell
Dido and Aeneas
Respighi
La bella dormente nel bosco
Creative Team
Dominic Wheeler
conductor
Olivia Fuchs
director
takis
designer
Jake Wiltshire
lighting designer
Victoria Newlyn
movement director
Streaming link: www.gsmd.ac.uk/music/virtual_opera