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.
Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2020 will, without a shadow of a doubt, take place in the realm of the imagination, and might even welcome audiences to performances in the real world as well.
In Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival’s world, it is not unusual for Shakespeare’s Macbeth to decamp with a pantomime camel, for the bones of humans to transform into violins, for penguins to play clapping games in parks or to have endless growth of the hair atop your head. If there’s one thing for sure, you can count on Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival for its unbounded imagination.
Because it’s so outrageously good at all things imaginative, the Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2020 will go ahead by the act of imagination itself, until the possible becomes the actual and a cornucopia of new operas can be shared in real time and in a real space. This vision for a real opera festival in an imaginary world has been set out in a Manifesto on Tête à Tête’s website. The Manifesto asserts that the festival is a collaboration between artists and audience; the artists affect the audience and their audience affects their artists in real time, in a living, breathing space. You fuel their imagination just as they fuel yours.
They will not make art in isolation. All of the projects Tête à Tête artists and companies are currently working on will see the living light of day, or, perhaps, some dazzling stage lighting, or maybe even just the glorious light of the imagination. In a blog post on the Tête à Tête website, Artistic Director Bill Bankes-Jones expands on this Manifesto, saying ‘what we love about theatre is coming together, not being apart’. Until Tête à Tête can welcome you once more into a real space in real time, the festival and its artists and companies will share with you their creative processes, dreams, challenges and much else besides as they build their imaginary operas in anticipation of the eventual live performance. Tête à Tête is committed to its artists and companies, whose premieres they will eventually stage. Through this commitment, Tête à Tête will be able to extend and develop its usual mentoring for each company and group of artists, offering help where they need it, with dramaturgy, musical issues, casting, administrative and technical challenges.
As always, the Festival will create a web page for each opera premiere. This year, artists are urged to use these to open up the process of creating an opera to fellow artists and audiences. In his blog post, Bill has stated that artists will share the creative work behind their operas, including videos, sound recordings, draft libretti and scores, designs, storyboards and the literary and visual references that inspire and feed into the productions. The sharing of the developments of the operas will take a myriad of forms, both online and off. In the manifesto, Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival artists pledge to do their utmost to make sure their work will also reach those without access to the online world.
They are calling upon every ounce of their imagination to make sure the festival happens in this real world; that will hopefully be at the Cockpit Theatre this September, Cubitt Sessions this Summer, or its famous pop-up operas, scattered periodically and spatially over the next year. If, on this occasion, this vision has to be curtailed, then Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival believes that its imagined manifestations will still have a very great, very real value.
In his blog post, Bill Bankes-Jones has stressed that by having a real opera festival in an imaginary world the festival has the advantage of having a fully formed programme. This means that if the Cockpit performances have to be delayed, for example, then Tête à Tête will be able to reschedule the festival must faster than they otherwise would, and will be able to transfer the programme en bloc.
Ultimately, Tête à Tête: A Real Opera Festival in An Imaginary World is designed to display what the company is really good at; connecting with people in real time and inspiring them and nurturing its artists. The imaginary festival is a true statement of what the company really likes to be doing, rather than a programme of work comprised by circumstance that does not reflect the company’s values. Artistic Director Bill Bankes-Jones said: 'Our festival might not be able to take place in real space and time this year, but it can certainly exist in an imagined world. Since time immemorial creativity and art has drawn its inspiration from the wild space of the imagination. Come and meet us there! Many have preceded us in this; the artist Damien Hirst's exhibition of artefacts from an imagined shipwreck, the imagined poet Ossian who triggered a whole genre of Ossianic Literature, capturing imaginations in the eighteenth century before ‘online’ was even dreamed of, and director Peter Greenaway's imaginary character, Tulse Luper, with the ever-fascinating contents of his suitcases. Like these artists and writers who've gone before us, we want to share our work with you and inspire you. We collaborate with artists and share the work in one space with our audience - that is why we will never make art in isolation. Let’s meet in the space of the imagination, until we can be all together in the same physical space.’
Tête à Tête : The Opera Festival is famous (and notorious) for giving artists and companies a platform to experiment with unconventional new forms of opera. Tête à Tête is continuing to provide worldwide community-building in opera, through its YouTube channel #MyNewOpera which launched in 2018 to provide a digital collection of videos of opera.
More information on the Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2020 will be released soon. If you would like to be notified when tickets go on sale, please sign up to Tête à Tête’s mailing list here here .