Silent Opera News
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2024-03-28
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2021-10-12 08:30:14
Catalonia, Poland, Canada and more: London Sinfonietta's new season
[…] also a training event as the London Sinfonietta will be playing side-by-side with players from the Royal Academy of Music (6/5/2022). Opera performances include a new chamber version of Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle being performed at Stone Nest as the inaugural production of Theatre of Sound, with Susan Bullock, Gweneth Ann Rand, Gerald Finley and Michael Hayes. The director is Daisy Evans and music director is Stephen Higgins, both of whom have been prime movers in Silent Opera (November 2021). And the orchestra will be in the pit when Tom Coult's opera Violet (much anticipated and much delayed by pandemic cancellations) gets its premiere at the Aldeburgh Festival, with performances at the Hackney Empire, Buxton Festival and more (June 2022) Other explorations include jazz with London Third Stream, an evening of new commissions which blur the boundary between classical and jazz, and Cathy Milliken's new work Night Shift which blurs the […]
2021-08-18 10:23:00
[…] Overture. Rehearsal for a traditional staging is under way, directed by an actor-ly woman who, suggestively, later plays the Witch. (Her chance at last to shine, or something more sinister?) Two children, Hannah and Gemma, commence a disruption of proceedings that offers both opportunity—the path to their surprise assumption of the central roles—but also apparent danger, let out into the world without their telephones, their parents both concerned and distracted. Daisy Evans, artistic director of Silent Opera, brings her experience to bear in having much of the earlier action play out on two aural levels: we set our headphones according to whether we wish to listen to the children’s or the adults’ perspective. In practice, we probably flit between the two—as with our eyes too, sometimes in harmony, sometimes not. It initially seemed surprising that this experiment did not continue, but coming together after estrangements of various kinds is surely […]
2021-08-11 08:20:30
Theatrical dazzle: Hansel & Gretel re-invented as a modern theatrical fairytale at British Youth Opera
[…] Max Pappenheim and puppetry directed by Matthew Forbes, with Hilary Cronin as Mother, Ellie Neate as Gemma (Gretel), Amy Holyland as Hannah (Hansel), Fiona Finsbury as the Witch, Jack Lee as Father, Rosalind Dobson as the Dew Fairy, Eva Gheorghiu as the Sandman, and an onstage band including Jack Beesley (keyboard, trainee repetiteur), Olivia Shotton (violin, trainee assistant musical director) and members of Southbank Sinfonia. Daisy Evans is the founder and artistic director of Silent Opera and the evening was very much inspired by Silent Opera's work. We were all given headphones and the sounds we heard were a mix of the live singers, the live instrumentalists, electronic music and pre-recorded symphonic music (mainly the orchestral interludes in the opera), with the arrangement being by Stephen Higgins and Max Pappenheim. The performance featured a new libretto by Evans and was more of a free fantasy on Humperdinck's opera, all […]
2021-07-25 09:07:15
Janacek's forest could easily be on a London estate around the corner from the theatre: The Cunning Little Vixen at Opera Holland Park
[…] interleaved this with the rather sad stories of the humans involved, the two coming together in the magical finale. Complicating this is the way Janacek anthropomorphises the animals, which leads us to ask what is the world of the forest? This is a question each director has to ask, whether we go full cutesy with a high degree of pictorial naturalism or completely gritty with the forest replaced by a realistic modern world (such as Silent Opera's Vixen set on the streets of London). Most productions choose to hover between the two and Stephen Barlow's imaginatively stripped back production (with designs by Andrew D Edwards) managed to give us plenty of food for thought. The traditional doublings were used, so that the human and animal world was interweavoven and Barlow introduced an extra doubling, with Jennifer France (who plays the Vixen) playing the silent role of Terynka, the local flame-haired […]
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