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.
The Rossini festival of Rossini’s hometown, Pesaro, streams the premiere of its new production of La cambiale di matrimonio, Rossini’s second opera on August 8 (and briefly “on demand” after).
The premiere is at 8:30 PM, August 8, Central European Time (Rome), thus at 7:30 PM in London, at 2:30 PM in New York and at 11:30 AM in San Francisco. The premiere will be streamed from the Rossini Opera Festival website rossinioperafestival.it, as well as from ItaliaFestival.tv (it’s free to register) where it may be found for the following 48 hours.
The five, live performances take place in Pesaro’s Teatro Rossini. Built as the Teatro Nuovo in 1818 it was then inaugurated by Rossini conducting his La gazza ladra. Its classical Italian horseshoe shape has been retained through its many renovations and upgrades, the latest in 2002.
For this production the theater has been adapted to our new pandemic world. Each of the theater’s 95 (or so) boxes will hold but two patrons, the orchestra will be seated on the orchestra (parterre [in French] or platea [in Italian], the action said to be taking place on the stage.
Stage director Laurence Dale with assistant in Teatro Rossini
La cambiale di matrimonio was last seen in Pesaro in 2006. This new 2020 production is staged by British Laurence Dale, once a singer, now a stage director, once the artistic director of Opera Africa, now artistic director of the Evian Festival. Designer Gary McCann has collaborated with stage director Dale for several productions at Holland’s Nederlandse Reisopera (aka the Dutch Touring Company).
Conductor Dmitry Korchak is well known to Pesaro audiences, having achieved considerable distinction as a singer in a number of baritenore roles. As well he has an active career as a conductor in Russia. In Pesaro he conducted Rossini’s Stabat Mater in 2016.
The cast is led by well-known buffo baritone Carlo Lepore as Mill, a shady London businessman who wants to marry his daughter to Snoot, a generous Canadian businessman sung by baritone Iurii Samoilov (a recent Billy Budd at the Bolshoi Opera). Mill’s daughter Fanni is sung by soprano Giuliana Gianfaldoni, who really loves the impoverished Edoardo, sung by Davide Giusti. Both young lovers are former participants in the Festival’s Accademia Rossiniana.
This youthful work premiered in 1810 when Rossini was only 18 years old, the first of his operas to be presented in a professional theater. Six years later Rossini reworked its first act duet into The Barber of Seville’s famed “Dunque io son” (the object of Lindoro’s affections).
There is a curtain raiser to Rossini’s brief farce. It is the 18 minute dramatic cantata Giovanna d’Arco that Rossini composed in 1832 for mezzo-soprano (Rossini’s last opera Guillaume Tell was composed in 1829). The cantata is four concert arias with piano, though here it is in an orchestral version by Salvatore Sciarrino performed by Pesaro’s Orchestra Sinfonica G. Rossini. The artist is Marianna Pizzolato who in 2010 enjoyed great success in the title role of Rossini’s biggest and best comedy, La cenerentola.
For more information about the theaters used by Pesaro’s Rossini Opera Festival please see Two Summer Festivals That Can. Scroll down.
Michael Milenski