News
Longborough’s inaugural Ring Cycle Conducting Fellow
Longborough Festival Opera has appointed Harry Sever as its first Ring Cycle Conducting Fellow. Harry will work alongside Longborough Music Director and eminent Wagnerian Anthony Negus for the next three seasons, building towards its 2024 Ring cycle. For his first performance in the post, Harry will conduct Siegfried at Longborough on Friday 3 June 2022….
Jack Furness to produce Rusalka at Garsington
Jack Furness is to take over from Michael Boyd to produce Garsington Opera’s 2022 Rusalka. Due to ill health, director Michael Boyd has had to withdraw from the production that was originally scheduled for summer 2020. Jack Furness will make his Garsington Opera debut. The production will have designs by Tom Piper. Douglas Boyd, Artistic…
Opera North announces winter season
Questions of power and identity, love and loss, will be coming to theatres across the North of England in the new year as Opera North opens its winter season with two new productions, while also offering another chance to see its new production of Carmen which premiered in September. The Company’s eagerly-awaited concert staging of…
Opera Holland Park unleashes The Bear
Opera Holland Park’s production of William Walton’s take on the Chekhov comedy The Bear is being screened online during November on a “pay what you feel” basis. Filmed and recorded live on location in Stone House over two days in April 2021, Walton’s witty one-act opera reunites the cast and creative team of Opera Holland…
Longborough announces details of 2022 season
Longborough Festival Opera continues its Wagner voyage with Siegfried opening its 2022 season. Other works are Korngold Die tote Stadt, Bizet’s Carmen and a double bill of Waley-Cohen’s Spell Book and Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina. The new Ring cycle began with critically acclaimed performances of Das Rheingold in 2019 and a concert staging of Die Walküre in 2021. “With Siegfried we return to…
Unlike Butterfly, no yellow face concerns for WNO at Expo Dubai 2020
A troupe of mainly British singers are off to the desert sunshine for Welsh National Opera’s collaboration with the United Arab Emirates on Al Wasl Opera, part of Expo 2020 Dubai. While in the UK and other countries producing theatres continue to be careful about ethnic casting, there are no such concerns with this production. The…
How should we ensure companies actually perform?
In 1959 the House of Commons endorsed the principle of public subsidy and the independence of the arts. This largely began state subsidy of the arts. By 1962 the Royal Opera was told its subsidy would be pegged at 87.5 per cent of the previous year’s income. The more shows they put on the more…
Un Nos Ola Leuad – Leading Welsh singers record a new Welsh language Opera
I’ve been composing to commission for over 40 years now, in about as many genres as you could shake a baton at, but had never written an opera. Not, that is, until 2014 or thereabouts, the time when the BBC finally dispensed with my services as the presenter (since the late 70s) of the daily…
Longborough’s Die Walkure available on demand
Longborough Festival Opera is streaming its 2021 concert performance of Die Walkure. Watch here(Available on demand until Friday 25 February 2022) This concert production of Die Walküre was filmed live at Longborough Festival Opera on 8 June as part of the festival’s new Ring cycle. Wotan is sung by Cardiff singer Paul Carey Jones. The cycle began in June 2019,…
Welsh National Opera finds way through Madam Butterfly minefield
Welsh National Opera is scheduling a series of events around its performances of Puccini’s Madam Butterfly on the type of subjects that have been used to attack arts organisations under the banner of inclusivity, for their choice of work and for non-race matched casting. A new production has been commissioned. It follows a similar approach…