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.
Streetwise Opera were joined by baritone Roderick Williams, the Brodsky Quartet and Genesis Sixteen for a special ‘virtual’ performance of Schubert’s ‘Der Lindenbaum’, the fifth song of the composer’s song-cycle Winterreise, bringing this year’s Ryedale Festival Online to a pensive close.
Streetwise Opera is both an award-winning performing arts charity for people affected by homelessness, running a programme of regular creative workshops in homeless centres and arts venues in five regions across England, and a critically acclaimed opera company. Those who participate in the company’s workshops create and perform in new productions work alongside exceptional professional artists.
Performing Iain Farrington’s new arrangement of Schubert’s song, 23 Streetwise Opera singers, workshop leaders and support workers sang alongside Roderick Williams and eight professional singers from Genesis Sixteen - a young artists’ scheme established by The Sixteen in 2011 which aims to nurture the next generation of talented choral singers and create a bridge from conservatories and universities into the singing profession - accompanied by the Brodsky Quartet and pianist Christopher Glynn, the Festival’s Artistic Director.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca-2wQuWrYE
Farrington’s arrangement complements William Müller’s poetic imagery, the richness of the strings’ interjections heightening the colours and textures of the rustling leaves, the chill of the cruel wind’s icy blasts, and the depth of the night’s darkness - images further visually elaborated in director Freya Wynn-Jones short film. The breeze stirs up crisp autumnal leaves to reveal a violin nestled amid the undergrowth. Williams slowly treads a lone path through waist high grasses, like one of Thomas Hardy’s ‘solitary pedestrians’, towards the distant beckoning tree. Silver light flickers through the woodland canopy. A sole leaf flutters onto still water.
The English translation by Jeremy Sams is direct and is complemented by verbal fragments - “You belong”, “Come back to me and rest here” - written on leaves, held aloft. The tempo is expansive, enhancing the dream-like mood and conveying the sense of comfort that Schubert’s wanderer feels as he reclines under the linden tree’s protective branches. But, with the brutal blast which gusts into the traveller’s face and jolts his hat roughly from his head, Williams solo voice pushes forward, the tension only dissolving with the final stanza’s retrospective recollections of the tree’s restful safe haven.
Following this unusual and moving performance of ‘Der Lindenbaum’, the Carducci Quartet completed the recital, performing Phillip Glass’s String Quartet No.3 (Mishima) and Beethoven’s String Quartet in F minor Op.95 No.11 (Serioso). Their performance was filmed at Castle Howard - a magnificent medley of Baroque flamboyance and Palladian graciousness surrounded by 1000-acres of parkland and woodland, the building of which was begun by the 3rd Earl of Carlisle in 1699 and reached completion over 100 years later. Damaged by fire in 1940, Castle Howard subsequently became best-known to many as ‘Brideshead’ in the 1981 television serial and 2008 film adaptations of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
The rich acoustic of the Long Gallery enriched Glass’s meditative reflections on the life of Yukio Mishima, music which was originally composed for Paul Schrader’s 1985 film, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. Compact in form, its music very condensed, this F Minor Quartet is Beethoven’s shortest string quartet, but it conveys a scope and power that belie its surface dimensions. Beethoven acknowledged the radical nature of this ‘Quartetto serioso’, which he composed in 1810, when he told the composer-conductor Sir George Smart that the Quartet was “written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public”. This remark, and the apparent interiority of the Quartet, seem to raise interesting questions about the relationship between composer, the performer and the listener - questions which, as performers and audiences alike adapt to new ways of communicating and sharing musical experiences made the Carducci’s performance a fitting and reflective conclusion to the 2020 Ryedale Festival Online.
Claire Seymour
This concert is available to view until Sunday 16th August 2020, along with the other events in the 2020 Ryedale Festival Online.