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.
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.
To create Notes From Isolation, Lewis and Laura interviewed performers about their experiences in lockdown, with the aim of bringing to life each person’s story in a bespoke song showcasing not only their artistry but also their unique humanity. The result is a series of beautiful and poignant new pieces, with each element of the creative process – text, music, piano track, vocal recording and visual material – created in isolation and brought together in a resulting video to be released online. Four of eight songs have been released thus far, and they are viewable online now via Murphy & Attridge's website and social media platforms (links below), with the next four being released across October.
Everyone participating in the project is donating their time, and each performer is nominating a charity to champion with their song. Charities supported to date include The Dumfries and Galloway Befriending Project, Help Musicians, The Pituitary Foundation, OperAffinity, The Fawcett Society and the Lebanese Red Cross.
Performers: Nicky Spence, Natalya Romaniw, Catriona Morison, Julien Van Mellaerts and Sofia Castillo (flute), Isabelle Peters, Marta Fontanals-Simmons, David Horton, Dame Felicity Lott
Pianist: Dylan Perez
Film & Audio: Jamie Hall
Music & Words: Murphy & Attridge
Lewis Murphy & Laura Attridge say -
“We discovered early on in the interviews that however difficult the experiences of each performer, the conversation always turned towards moments of profound joy and hope - we wanted to honour that resilience and optimism in the face of great crisis and ongoing trauma; we therefore focused our efforts on bringing those particular moments to life in order to bring that same joy and hope to our audience members. Every piece is therefore really a note from isolation from each performer to say ‘we can get through this’.”
Lewis Murphy and Laura Attridge have quickly established themselves as one of the most exciting young creative partnerships on the opera scene today. They are particularly interested in making socially conscious work which responds directly to the modern world and asks questions of its viewers. Their ever-growing portfolio together already includes commissions from the Royal Opera House, Scottish Opera, Glyndebourne, the National Opera Studio, and Sound Festival. Lewis and Laura's latest commission is a new one-act opera for Leeds Youth Opera entitled ARC23, set to premiere in 2021.
“Laura and Lewis have started their collaboration for Glyndebourne’s Young Composer-in-Residence scheme with Belongings, an impressive opera drawing its inspiration from deeply moving human experiences during the refugee crisis, a hot topic of the time and always valid in some part of the world. Belongings clearly shows how Laura and Lewis have worked closely and inspired each other. A very promising work that makes me look forward to their next projects together.”
Sebastian Schwarz, former General Director, Glyndebourne
Links:
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJvIGWqnYkbMEDlpt4H8nJA
Website: https://murphyattridge.com/portfolio/notes-from-isolation/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/murphyattridge
Instagram: @Murphy_Attridge
Twitter: @Murphy_Attridge