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.
A brand-new opera - A Feast in the Time of Plague - will be performed by Grange Park Opera, live on the stage of the Theatre in the Woods on Sunday 13 September 2020 in front of an invited audience of 250 people.
With a libretto by opera-giant Sir David Pountney and music by Alex Woolf, A Feast in the Time of Plague is the only new opera to have been commissioned during lockdown. It will be filmed, and later streamed free to be accessible online for everyone around the world.
This will be the first opera in the UK to be performed inside a theatre, and with an audience, since lockdown.
Wasfi Kani, Founder/ CEO of Grange Park Opera, says : “We’ve decided to take a leap to perform this live in front of an audience. This new opera has 12 performers around a very, very long table - groaning with luscious delicacies. We are taking the utmost precautions. The five levels of the Theatre in the Woods normally seats more than 700 people. It means that the 250 audience members will each have a volume of air of 31 cubic metres - considerably more than a half-full plane to Greece upon which 100 passengers have a mere 2.34 cubic metres. In my view it’s time we all got moving again, and I don’t mean flying to Greece.”
· A new opera based on Alexander Pushkin’s 1830 fragment of the same title
· Pountney completed the libretto in early June; composer, Alex Woolf, completed his score in 6 weeks
· The UK’s first opera performance in a theatre will have an invited audience of 250 inside the Theatre in the Woods.
· The performers and crew will be tested for antibodies Medical Detection Dogs have been asked to provide dogs to help detect any trace of viruses· The audience will be seated in household groups and in private boxes
· They will be invited to bring teddy bears to place in surrounding seatsPountney explains how his libretto developed whilst in lockdown in Wales: “ I responded to Pushkin’s little fragment by creating 12 - because of the Last Supper - very varied characters who arrive voluntarily and most of whom depart involuntarily - i.e. they die. In between they capture the defiance and solidarity that we have all experienced during these strange times. The virus exposes truths about all of us in surprising ways. A Feast in the Time of Plague captures this - as well as the essential lesson that we must carry on laughing.”
Gramophone magazine as “a major presence in starry company.”
A superb cast of virtuoso performers includes superstar baritone Sir Simon Keenlyside, Welsh tenor Wynne Evans - famous for his TV campaign for insurance website, Go Compare - and Wagnerian soprano Susan Bullock, who has appeared many times at Covent Garden. She plays Claire the clairvoyant who predicts the plague:
I read in my old papyrus // That the dread Corona Virus // Would rage
until 2021.
I told Tommy when he reaches // The Normandy beaches, // Poor boy, your
race will soon be run.
I saw the end of the Titanic // All the tragedy and panic // Before she
even set out to sea.
I knew that Dodi and Diana // Would die in such a manner - // Yes, that
was all revealed to me.”
Bullock champions the idea of public performances: “It’s time that we performers are allowed to get back into the theatre. We need to find a way to make this work - and quickly. We are all aware of what we must do in order to keep colleagues and audiences as safe as possible”.
All the musicians, singers and technicians are being paid for this historic first step for theatre in 2020.
For more information about A Feast in the Time of Plague, plus past and forthcoming performances visit www.grangeparkopera.co.uk, or follow @grangeparkopera on social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram YouTube).