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.
Back in the early 1980’s two good ideas came to fruition: the much-needed new concert hall for Cardiff, capital city of Wales, and plans to hold within it the first “Singer of the World” competition.
When one looks back at early videos of the first competition in 1983 and compares with today’s slick production several things become evident. In 2007 there is a far larger geographical spread of contestants and there is now remarkable vocal quality-in-depth. On a more frivolous front, and perhaps indicative of current obsessions with image in the world of opera, the frocks on display have also become extremely sexy and chic compared to their distinctly dowdy predecessors. The men’s tailoring has changed rather less, it must be said, although it is obvious that they, too, are now more aware of their presentation on stage – one Finalist this year, countertenor David DQ Lee, looking particularly stylish.
Since that first competition (which, incidentally, Karita Mattila won) there have been many exciting, memorable performances and vocal trials of strength. Who can forget the 1989 “battle of the baritones” between Bryn Terrell and Dmitri Hvorostovsky? This bi-annual contest has grown steadily in size and stature over the years, and it is now regarded as one of the premier singing competitions in the world. Certainly recent Winners and Finalists of both the Main Prize and the Lieder Prize read like a contemporary hall of fame: Nicole Cabell, Ailish Tynan, Katarina Karnéus, Lisa Gasteen, Marius Brenciu, Christopher Maltman and Andrew Kennedy, to name just a few.
This year’s competition will have been hard-fought and exhausting for both juries and
contestants – over 1000 people applied to take part, 677 from 64 countries took part in auditions
held in 44 locations around the globe, and the final 25 singers who have survived the selection
process so far arrived in Cardiff this week. Although the two Prizes are valuable in monetary
terms - £15,000 and £5,000 for Singer of the World and the Rosenblatt Recital Song Prize
respectively with £2,500 for each of this year’s other four finalists – it is the world media
exposure that is often the key to future success for these young performers. Cardiff is a shop
window, par excellence.
One very famous face who is there to welcome them is the competition’s Patron, Dame Joan Sutherland who said “the competition is always a wonderful experience for not only the St. David’s Hall audience and multimedia audiences across the world, but is also a delight for every competitor taking part.” Today, Cardiff Singer of the World is very much a global entertainment, with a TV, radio and online audience of eight million able to watch, listen and download information on the wealth of young vocal talent on display, not forgetting, of course, those frocks.
The competition is now under way with the two Finals being decided on Friday and Sunday nights. Details of timings, tickets, master classes and contestants are available online at www.bbc.co.uk/cardiffsinger
Sue Loder © 2007