Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2008

01

July

Carysfort Stories

After studying jazz and classical music in Austria there was no other choice for Georg & Thomas than going to London for a different view as opposed to what everybody would suppose them to do. With no specific plan in mind they just started...

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01

July

Don’t Go Down the Elephant After Midnight

In 2002 Patricia Rozario sang the soprano solo in “The Vision of Piers plowman”, Andrew’s oratorio, with the Philharmonia Orchestra. Shortly afterwards she was asked by Tom Morris, now at the National Theatre, to nominate a composer to...

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01

July

Dumbfounded!

I have loved the stories of Saki since I was a teenager. He was introduced to me by my mother, who, if anyone passed comment on her cooking, would reply with the line: ‘She was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went.’ For years...

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01

July

Five:15

Five:15 Operas Made in Scotland is five, specially commissioned, fifteen minute operas produced through collaboration between Scottish Opera and some of the leading figures working in Scotland’s vibrant creative industries. Each of our...

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01

July

Flam

Flam is devised by Orlando Gough, Emma Bernard, Melanie Pappenheim and Rebecca Askew (aka ‘Flam Productions’). It is a work in development, exploring the vocal, physical and comic possibilities of this extraordinary pair of performers. .Flam is...

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01

July

Ingrained Deeds…

Ellan Parry and Catherine Kontz are excited to return to this year’s festival with a preview of two fragments of a new experimental opera ‘Electra’, which they have created in collaboration with writer Alexia Anastasiadis. They aim to present...

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01

July

It’s 10pm! They’re Late!

Helen called up playwright Bettina Gracias and said, “Would you like to write an opera monologue for me for a slot at the Riverside studios on the 9th of August?” She said, “It sounds fun but I think I’m going away to India”, so here we...

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01

July

Johnny’s Midnight Goggles

Johnny’s Midnight Goggles began on a balcony in the south of France, when I looked up one day and saw a mysterious black camel in the nearby sports field, which soon disappeared. A little later, after they let me out of the psychiatric ward, I...

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01

July

Kasper Hauser

While living in Israel twelve years ago and experiencing life as a foreigner the director and librettist Anke Rauthmann first had the idea for an operatic dramatisation of the Kaspar Hauser material. The libretto was written over a number of years...

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01

July

Lost & Found

Lost and Found is one component of a larger work called The Foundling. This new work will be shown next year at the Foundling Museum in London as a performance in April as part of the Handel celebrations and then in October as a video and sound...

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01

July

Mandala

Mandala grew out of the voice and composition workshops I run every year on the island of Skyros in Greece, and at the Esalen Institute in California. Looking to create music that was a bridge between classical and pop, I based my approach on the...

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01

July

My Friend Annie & Anything Money Can Buy

‘Anything Money Can Buy’ was commissioned by the Opera Group in collaboration with Opera Genesis and Selfridges. As the performance was to take place in Selfridges Department store, myself and Alasdair came up with the idea of using the...

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01

July

Pétrouchka

The idea to arrange Stravinsky’s Pétrouchka for a small chamber ensemble came to me when I was preparing for a schools project. Pétrouchka is a brilliant story for children to learn and the ballet score is wonderfully evocative. However I...

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01

July

Photo Me

The first draft of ‘Photo Me’ was the result of a youth music theatre project devised and led by Karen, Brendon and Dominic. Many of the starting points for the shows’ characters came from those attending the workshops. Since then, the original...

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01

July

The Diary

The Diary in its first draft form was performed in December 2002 at the Joogleberry Playhouse in Brighton. Vanessa was played by Heather Cairncross (www.altovoice.co.uk) with the Big City Cabaret Band. Further revisions and expansion followed and the...

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01

July

The Errollyn Wallen Songbook

My songs spring upon me almost incidentally and they are a part of my daily life. When working on a large commission for huge forces (as in the case of my recent work, Carbon 12, for Welsh National Opera), having a song to turn to at the piano is a...

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01

July

The Others

Having presented live music performances for many years, sounduk wanted to start creating work with contemporary music thoroughly integrated into the performance. The idea for a miniature musical circus took seed a couple of years ago, and bided its...

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01

July

The Song Of Margery Kempe

The Song of Margery Kempe was conceived as a radically stripped-down sequel to my first opera Hildegard von Bingen (1997). A one-woman piece on Margery – a real housewife from medieval Norfolk – had been simmering in my mind for a while when I...

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01

July

Through Wood

Through Wood’ was developed in Leeds via Opera North’s ‘Resonance’ programme – a rolling series of artist residencies and performance projects. It began with Joe’s research into the image of the violin in folk mythologies across the world...

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01

July

Very Present Tense

These songs were written over a number of years in response to the loss of my mother. They have been companions in grief, composed at my piano, wandering through streets and sung into recorders on train platforms. I chose to write a song-cycle...

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01

July

Wajahat Khan

Indian classical music is one of the greatest musical traditions in the world. It originated from the Hindu temples of ancient India and further developed and flourished under the patronage of the Muslim rulers of the Moghul dynasty. It is based on a...

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01

July

You Must Have This

I confess. I’ve written the odd TV jingle. Whenever I cross the road from that crumbly, damp bungalow that is the arts world to the swank, gleaming palaces of the commercial sector, I inevitably have the feeling there must be a hidden camera...

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