Press Release
Updated 20 April 2017
2017/18 SEASON ANNOUNCEMENT
Contents
Dates of Press Nights Page 2
Overview Page 3
Mainstage production details
- Summer 2017 Page 8
- Autumn 2017 Page 9
- Winter 2018 Page 15
- Spring 2018 Page 18
Performance diary Page 19
Press Nights 2017/2018*
Summer 2017
Sat 24 Jun Britten Billy Budd (Aldeburgh Festival) 7.00pm
Autumn 2017
THE LITTLE GREATS: Six short operas with huge emotions
Sat 16 Sep Leoncavallo Pagliacci 7.15pm NEW
Sat 16 Sep Ravel L’enfant et les sortilèges 9.00pm NEW
Wed 27 Sep Mascagni Cavalleria rusticana 7.15pm NEW
Wed 27 Sep Sullivan Trial by Jury 9.00pm NEW
Wed 11 Oct Janáček Osud 7.15pm NEW
Wed 11 Oct Bernstein Trouble in Tahiti 9.00pm NEW
Winter 2018
Fri 19 Jan Puccini Madama Butterfly 7.30pm
Sat 3 Feb Verdi Un ballo in maschera 7.00pm NEW
Wed 21 Feb** Mozart Don Giovanni 7.00pm
Spring 2018
Thu 19 Apr Strauss Salome (Leeds Town Hall) 7.30pm NEW
*All press nights held at Leeds Grand Theatre unless otherwise designated
** Press night for Don Giovanni will be the second performance, opening night is Sat 17 Feb
Highlights
· Opera North presents 11 mainstage productions for 2017/18, including eight new productions and three revivals.
· The Little Greats: Six short operas with huge emotions. Festival of one-act operas launches the year, with £10 tickets available for anyone who is a first-time attender in Leeds.
· Richard Farnes returns to conduct a new production of Un ballo in maschera, directed by Tim Albery.
· Opera North marks its mainstage return to Hull with a varied programme as part of Hull UK City of Culture 2017, including opera performances at Hull New Theatre and Hull City Hall, in addition to a sound installation for the Humber Bridge commissioned by Hull 2017, opening in April.
· 2016 production of Billy Budd reworked for dramatic concert performances at Aldeburgh Music Festival in Summer 2017, with Roderick Williams and Alan Oke returning to sing Billy Budd and Captain Vere, joined by Brindley Sherratt as Claggart.
· Online film release of the complete Opera North Ring cycle makes Wagner’s masterwork available for free on-demand streaming to a global audience from February 2017. Das Rheingold will also be broadcast on BBC Four.
· Work presented in the Howard Assembly Room, Leeds, includes India’s Children: a new co-commission with South Asian Arts UK marking 70 years since Partition.
· Members of the hugely versatile, 36-strong, full time Chorus of Opera North take all principal roles in Trial by Jury, in addition to many other roles throughout the year.
· The Orchestra of Opera North takes centre stage in Opera North’s series of dramatic concert stagings with Richard Strauss’s Salome, and continues to expand its symphonic concert repertoire.
· The Orchestra of Opera North is also performing more events programmed for families and newer audiences, with a new annual series of free outdoor concerts held in Leeds city centre starting from Summer 2017.
· Education and outreach programme includes In Harmony Opera North, now reaching over 1000 schoolchildren every week in Leeds, and a new year-long residency at the inner-city Adelaide Primary School, Hull, as part of Hull 2017 UK City of Culture.
· DARE, Opera North’s pioneering partnership with The University of Leeds, celebrates its 10th anniversary
The Little Greats: Six short operas with huge emotions
Autumn 2017 sees Opera North return to an experimental format first presented in 2004 for a new festival season. The Little Greats brings six short operas together in a series of changing combinations, from the well-known to rarely performed jewels of the genre: Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury, Janáček’s Osud, and Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti.
The season journeys from the raw, hot-blooded passion of 19th century Italian verismo, via the popular charm and unmatched comic style of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Victorian operetta, through the inventive modernism of Ravel and Janáček at the start of the 20th century, and ending in the 1950s with Bernstein’s fusion of operatic conventions with the newer musical languages of American jazz and musical theatre.
A company of artists has been assembled, all taking on multiple roles, with involvement of the Chorus in all but one of the pieces, and the whole season epitomises the kind of company spirit that is essential to Opera North’s character. The Chorus of Opera North is involved in five of the six pieces, and they also take all the principal roles in Trial by Jury. The ensemble of guest principal singers includes Giselle Allen, Peter Auty, Katie Bray, Richard Burkhard, Wallis Giunta, John Graham-Hall, Quirijn de Lang, Rosalind Plowright, Phillip Rhodes, John Savournin, Joseph Shovelton, Jonathan Stoughton, Ann Taylor, and Fflur Wyn. Opera North has played a key role in developing the careers of many of these artists.
The Little Greats is a season celebrating the rich variety of artistic elements that create opera: music, song, drama, poetry, stage design, dance and more. Presenting six operas in an accessible way, each of the pieces packs all the explosive power and energy of a complete operatic experience into their smaller form.
In Opera North’s home city of Leeds, the six operas will be presented in changing rotation, offering audiences the greatest possible flexibility to create their own path through the season, and creating new and unusual pairings in a single evening. Tickets for each opera will be sold separately, allowing audiences to choose to see a double-bill, have dinner before or after one of the pieces, or to simply attend one short opera at the most convenient time.
New links will be explored between the operas, with all six productions sharing some common elements of set and lighting design by Charles Edwards, who also directs the show which opens the season, Pagliacci. Annabel Arden directs L’enfant et les sortilèges and Osud, with the remaining three directed by John Savournin (Trial by Jury), Karolina Sofulak (Cavalleria rusticana) and Matthew Eberhardt (Trouble in Tahiti).
New ticket offers for The Little Greats: £10 tickets for new attenders
Opera North is committed to developing new audiences for opera and The Little Greats festival is the perfect way for newer audiences to experiment with the range of operatic styles in a shorter, bite-sized format. An enhanced set of ticket offers will be made available in Leeds especially for this season:
· £10 tickets for anyone new to opera, available for every performance in The Little Greats season in Leeds, supported by the Opera North Future Fund.
· £5 tickets for members of the Under 30s scheme and full-time students, available for every performance in The Little Greats (offered at all seat levels).
· Tickets on sale in Leeds from 28 February for season tickets, and on general sale from 27 March. (On sale dates and terms for tour venues may vary; further details available at www.operanorth.co.uk/seasontickets).
Richard Mantle, General Director, comments:
“What better way to start the new season than with a festival which really does demonstrate the diversity of operatic style, and the indomitable company spirit which is at the heart of everything we do. Opera is an enormous collective endeavour, and we hope in The Little Greats festival season, that our audiences will really feel as though they are on this incredible journey of discovery with us, as we fuse some rarely performed pieces into new pairings with enormous power and energy.
“I am especially pleased that we have been able to make the £10 ticket offer for first-time attenders available for this festival season. This has been underwritten by the Opera North Future Fund, reflecting the generous philanthropy of our core private supporters and their desire to help Opera North achieve genuine new audience development. This is a real demonstration of how passionately the opera audience wants opera to survive as an art form and how keen existing audiences are for more new people to experience the art form they love. The Company is extremely grateful for their support.”
Winter and Spring 2018
· Opera North’s Winter 2018 season includes revivals of two of the most popular pieces in the repertoire: Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, in a classic production by Tim Albery, and Alessandro Talevi’s innovative take on Mozart’s darkest work, Don Giovanni.
· Opera North’s first ever production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera sees the Company’s former music director Richard Farnes return to conduct, in a production by Tim Albery with a cast including Rafael Rojas as Gustavo, Adrienn Miksch as Amelia, and Patricia Bardon as Madame Arvindson.
· Opera North’s renowned series of dramatic concert stagings continues with Strauss’s viscerally shocking Salome.
Howard Assembly Room and Opera North Projects
The Little Greats is complemented by its sister festival Operatic, a series of events in the Howard Assembly Room, Leeds. Exploring the notion of what is considered ‘operatic’ across musical genres, performance and film, this includes an immersive live performance installation which returns to the very genesis of the art form of opera itself, taking inspiration from Monteverdi's Orfeo.
Other new Opera North projects in the Autumn season include India’s Children, a new production in collaboration with South Asian Arts UK, marking 70 years since Partition, which will bring together an ensemble of musicians from across Western and South Asian musical traditions. TheHoward Assembly Room’s bold mix of international, and cross genre programming includes a rare UK performance by American-Canadian violinist LeilaJosefowicz accompanied byJohn Novacek and a welcome return visit from folk trio Lau.
Opera North Education
Education continues to be a vital and thriving part of Opera North’s work, with a variety of workshops, schools’ activity, family activities and music ensembles currently running for young people aged 0-19, in addition to weekly workshops for adults and two large scale Community Residencies in Leeds (In Harmony Opera North) and Hull (Opera North Singing School).
A small sample of Opera North’s widely varied Education work:
· The Switch ON project has now been working in partnership with St George’s Crypt in Leeds for four years, delivering performance workshops to vulnerable adults affected by homelessness and helping them to rebuild self-confidence and communication skills.
· The development and progression of young singers and musicians, crucial to the future of opera, is realised in branches of the Opera North Children’s Chorus for children aged 8-14. Currently running in Leeds and Newcastle, a new Children’s Chorus is due to start in Nottingham in September 2017. Young people aged 14-19 form the Opera North Youth Chorus.
· The Company is continuing to expand Education activity across all of our touring regions in the North of England, particularly in Leeds, Manchester/Salford, Newcastle and Nottingham, with schools’ matinees of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges following 2017’s Hansel and Gretel, as well as introductory ‘Whistle Stop’ performances of Don Giovanni.
Full mainstage repertoire 2017/18
Summer 2017
Billy Budd
Benjamin Britten (1951)
Opens Sat 24 June 2017 (2 performances)
Sung in English
Opera North’s 2016 Billy Budd is reworked for two dramatic concert performances at Snape Maltings, as part of the 2017 Aldeburgh Festival, in the town most associated with Benjamin Britten’s life and work. It is believed to be the first time that Billy Budd has been performed in Aldeburgh in its entirety.
Billy Budd explores many of Britten’s recurrent themes with penetrating psychological insight: innocence corrupted, good destroyed by evil, and the outsider. It tells the tale of Billy, a young sailor who radiates beauty and goodness, provoking the envy of the ship’s Master at Arms, John Claggart. The one man who has it in his power to save Billy is the HMS Indomitable’s Captain Vere, who is haunted by his failure to do so.
For many, the power of Britten’s large-scale orchestral writing, the all-male forces, and the intensity with which he responds to the work’s subject matter make this his greatest operatic achievement.
A cast of leading Britten interpreters, conducted by Garry Walker, includes Roderick Williams in the title role and Alan Oke as Vere, both returning from Opera North’s 2016 production. Brindley Sherratt joins the cast as Claggart, the Master at Arms who helps seal Billy’s fate.
Cast and Creative Team includes:
Captain Vere Alan Oke
Billy Budd Roderick Williams
John Claggart Brindley Sherratt
Mr Redburn Peter Savidge
Mr Flint Dean Robinson
Lieutenant Ratcliffe Callum Thorpe
Red Whiskers Daniel Norman
Donald Eddie Wade
Dansker Conal Coad
Novice Oliver Johnston
The Novice’s Friend Gavan Ring
Conductor Garry Walker
Assistant Director Matthew Eberhardt
Autumn 2017
Pagliacci NEW
Ruggero Leoncavallo (1892)
Opens Sat 16 September 2017 (14 performances)
Sung in Italian with English titles
Part of The Little Greats: Six short operas with huge emotions
Thrilling, raw and shocking, this ‘bleeding slice of life’ packs an explosive punch into its running time of just over an hour. A travelling company of commedia dell’arte players prepares for a show, but their performance soon disintegrates, as a hidden affair unravels into dangerous, violent jealousy.
Leoncavallo’s most successful opera, Pagliacci (The Clowns) is a classic example of the heightened intensity, ‘real-life’ settings and compulsive dramatic drive of the Italian verismo style, with musical highlights including Canio’s celebrated aria ‘Vesti la giubba’ and Tonio’s Prologue. Often seen in a double-bill with Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, as part of The Little Greats festival season, Pagliacci can also be seen paired with Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges or Janáček’s Osud.
Charles Edwards directs and designs the opening show in Opera North’s festival of one act operas, with costumes by Gabrielle Dalton. Peter Auty returns to Opera North as the jealous husband, Canio, with Richard Burkhard as Tonio.
Cast and Creative Team includes:
Canio Peter Auty
Tonio Richard Burkhard
Beppe Joseph Shovelton
Silvio Phillip Rhodes
Conductor Tobias Ringborg
Director Charles Edwards
Set Designer Charles Edwards
Costume Designer Gabrielle Dalton
Lighting Designer Charles Edwards