Three Choirs Festival News
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2024-03-28
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2024-03-26 08:31:00
Worcester 2024: Three Choirs Festival releases full festival line-up along with announcing a new composer development scheme
Three Choirs Festival 2023 (Photo: James O'Driscoll)The Three Choirs Festival has launched a new composer development scheme. New Voices Academy will be devoted to choral music, led by composer Daniel Kidane and hosted by the Three Choirs Festival in partnership with Carice Singers and Spitalfields Music.Applications are now open, for the Academy will run from Friday 26 July to Tuesday 30 July, embedded within the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester, and will offer four ‘springboard’ and further ‘sandbox’ places for composers at the start of their professional careers. It will provide workshop, showcase, recording and networking opportunities alongside panel discussions and sessions on the practicalities and business of composition, concert and rehearsal access, and discussion time in which participants will co-design future iterations of the Academy so that it best serves today’s early-career composers.Applications are encouraged from any composer in the early stages of their career who feels they would […]
2024-02-10 09:27:00
A Star Next to the Moon: Stephen McNeff on his new opera, based on Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, a seminal novel of magic realism
[…] or three prominent roles there are no minor ones, so it suits the needs of the performance. The opera is called A Star Next to the Moon because the Juan Rulfo Foundation did not want Pedro Páramo as the title.Stephen's earlier opera, also with a libretto by Aoife Mannix, Beyond the Garden [see my article], which premiered in Slovenia in 2019, received its UK premiere in 2022 with performances at the Lichfield Festival and the Three Choirs Festival, but he is still hoping for a London premiere. His other operas have also included Vivienne, about T.S. Eliot's first wife [see my review, and also on CD] and Banished, based on Steven Gooch's play about the first women transported to Australia, Female Transport [see my review].Stephen McNeff’s latest opera, A Star Next to the Moon, receives its world premiere at The Guildhall School on 26 February 2024, at the Silk Street […]
2024-02-07 10:46:00
A lovely documentary from Scottish Opera that follows emerging artists Ross Cumming (baritone), Inna Husieva (soprano), Monwabisi Lindi (tenor), costume trainee Lovisa Litsgard, associate artist Lea Shaw (mezzo-soprano) and emerging artist repetiteur José Javier Ucendo, in their journey to create a performance of Rossini's The Barber of Seville in October 2023. [We caught both Inna Husieva and Monwabisi Lindi in opera scenes during their time at the National Opera Studio in January 2022, see my review, whilst Ross Cumming was Pilgrim in British Youth Opera's production of Vaughan Williams' The Pilgrim's Progress at the Three Choirs Festival in 2023, see my review]Ross Cumming, Inna Husieva and Lea Shaw will be performing around Scotland in Scottish Opera's Spring 2024 Opera Highlights tour. See the website for details.The documentary was filmed at Scottish Opera's Production Studios, Edington Street and Elmbank Crescent, and Theatre Royal Glasgow during October 2023. Filmed and edited by Antonia Bain. See the video on YouTube. […]
2024-01-24 07:29:00
Norfolk-based arts writer, Tony Cooper, enjoys a musical heritage tour to Leipzig, a relaxing and inviting city to visit awash with so much musical history.
[…] performance started the Bach ball rolling - and, thankfully, it hasn’t stopped. The music salon in the Mendelssohn Haus in Leipzig (Photo: Dirk Brzoska)Mendelssohn was special, though. He flourished in Leipzig like no other becoming conductor of the famous Leipzig Gewandhausorchester in his mid-20s and founded the Leipzig Conservatoire a decade later. A frequent visitor to England, the Birmingham Triennial Festival -who rotated their festival with Leeds and Norwich much in the same way as the Three Choirs Festival continues to do so today with the cathedral cities of Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester - commissioned Mendelssohn and he delivered them that momentous and inspiring oratorio, Elijah, composed in the spirit of his baroque predecessors, Bach and Handel. The work (his final composition) received its première in Birmingham Town Hall on 26th August 1846, conducted by the composer. It proved to be one of the high points of Mendelssohn’s illustrious career. Sadly, he […]