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 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.
Each project furthers the charity’s core objectives, and each has been developed and shaped in response to the changes the pandemic has forced on both the cultural sector and society in general.
MTFA is built on the ideas of fostering and renewing a sense of belonging and community through shared culture; of bringing together people of all backgrounds including the most disadvantaged with world-class professionals in the creation and experience of opera, music and theatre in as local a setting as possible; and challenging the perception that live music and theatre are not for everyone. Each project hinges on the idea that sharing the process of creating high quality music and theatre has a vital part to play in the revitalisation of our society and our economy, and each provides employment as well as engagement opportunities, championing excellence and accessibility.
About the Projects:Urban Operas:
Urban Operas will bring participants together across individual UK boroughs and cities for one year, during which time they will create their own show from start to finish. Local communities, schoolchildren, youth groups, choirs, local bands, dance groups, families and dramatic societies will work with industry professionals to: develop a libretto based on local stories; design and create sets, costumes and lighting; compose the score; perform the chorus roles and music; and stage manage and advertise the entire performance. The result will be a spectacular site-specific opera, designed for a particular city, by the people of that city. The project draws on the Royal Opera House’s acclaimed ‘Write an Opera’ scheme (1985-2015), which itself formed the basis of the Thurrock Community Opera Ludd and Isis performed in 2010 (and directed by MTFA artistic director Thomas Guthrie) to launch the ROH Production Park. MTFA are planning to bring Urban Operas to a number of different cities over the next 20 years, starting in the London Borough of Culture Lewisham in 2022.
The Secret Library:
A brand new opera inspired by the true story of underground rebel fighters who created a secret library in Syria in 2014. This opera will be made in collaboration with Syrian refugees through Together Production’s Sing for Freedom Choir and Orchestra of Syrian Musicians, who will take part in the development process. An inspiring story of courage, determination, imagination, and the power of books and stories to educate, entertain and set free in the most inhumane of circumstances.
Schubert 200:
Schubert’s three great song cycles came about in a creative, spontaneous storytelling atmosphere where friends dressed up, recited poetry and brought along different instruments. Schubert 200 will celebrate this historical approach, by creating highly engaging, visually creative performances of each cycle, using puppetry and arrangements for unusual instrumentation to bring them to life and appeal to wider audiences. MTFA will tour performances of the three cycles to coincide with their respective 200th anniversaries (Die schöne Müllerin in 2023, Winterreise in 2027 and Schwanengesang in 2028), and will record the arrangements with international guitarist Craig Ogden and members of Barokksolistene (dir Bjarte Eike) for Rubicon Classics.
MTFA Founder and Artistic Director Thomas Guthrie comments:
About Music and Theatre For All
Founded in 2014 by Thomas Guthrie, Music and Theatre for All (MTFA) produces highly acclaimed, cutting edge, work that brings people of all ages and backgrounds together with world-class professionals in the creation and experience of opera, music and theatre.
Past projects include Where Have All The Flowers Gone (2020) which was archived by the British Film Institute and featured on US, Finnish and BBC Breakfast TV; Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (2019), praised as “a subtle, stylish and multi-layered response to Monteverdi’s treatment of the Greek myth” (The Times); and Real Life Actually (2015-2016) and Death Actually (2014) which were called “winningly intense" (The Evening Standard) and “gloriously unexpected entertainment” (The Times).
Projects have been featured at the Spitalfields Music Summer and Winter Festivals, Brighton Festival, Barbican Centre, LSO St Lukes, York Early Music Festival, online, and in schools, churches and community settings.
MTFA believes that:
- opera and theatre should be accessible to all, rich and poor, young and old, and that as such it should focus on issues common to us all
- storytelling, singing and theatre are essential to community and vital for whatever it is that makes us human
- enabling audiences and participants to go on their own journey and to connect with their own imagination is preferable to telling them what to think
- singing is both an extreme physical art and a basic need, and every single one of us can do it. Combined with storytelling, it can make our most visceral and communicative art form
For more information, visit
https://musicandtheatreforall.org/