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Singing, dancing & sharing ideas for Street Opera!

Following our session with the brilliant Roehampton Base Youth Club as part of the adaptation process of our new street opera, we also visited the Elders Group at Katherine Low Settlement to share our work and pick their brains! The lovely Elspeth Wilkes led some vocal warm ups with the group, accompanied Claire Wild singing a few numbers from opera, musical theatre and well known songs to get everyone singing along and we showed filming and discussed how we rewrite and adapt operas for high street performances. Elspeth even got the group singing an opera chorus and some of the group joined in dancing! We also discussed some of the problems of adapting Elixir of Love for London life today and the group had lots of brilliant ideas for solving them – thank you for your help! Another brilliant session as part of our adaptation and we can’t wait to be back later in the process to share some of the scenes we’ve created. Meanwhile Jo needs to get her head down in the libretto and Leo is hard at work on those dots….

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Drama games, dazzling ideas and descants…

As part of the adaptation process to re-write The Elixir of Love into a modern English street opera for London life today, the team this year are also working with two local community groups who we wanted to engage further in the process of our work.

Previously when we’ve done our street performances at and around Roehampton Base Youth Club we’ve had such fantastic responses from the brilliant young people that we thought it would be a good idea to visit them at a much earlier stage of the process. And what an amazing time we had with the group! SO much laughter and SO many brilliant ideas from all of the young people and staff. Nadege led drama games, Leo played the bassoon, Claire sang and led vocal warm ups, and we discussed The Elixir of Love and ideas for who the characters would be and how the story might work in London today. The group were just as brilliant at Eastenders Zip Zap Boing as helping us sort out some of the story’s problems! Thank you so much to everyone involved, to the brilliant Roehampton Base team for organising, to Arts Council England for funding – and we absolutely can’t wait to be back very soon!

 

 

 

 

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Announcing the Cast of Carmen!

We are delighted to announce the cast of Carmen:

Felicity Buckland – Carmen (Arcola Theatre)

Felicity Buckland

Felicity trained at the RNCM and on English National Opera’s Opera Works programme.

Recent solo appearances include Kasturbai, Glass Satyagraha for ENO, Wellgunde Wagner The Rhinegold for Birmingham Opera and Nicklausse, Offenbach The Tales of Hoffmann for Kentish Opera. Previous ENO highlights include cover roles in The Valkyrie, The Mask of Orpheus (Birtwistle), Orpheus in the Underworld, Carmen, and Olivier-Award winning Porgy and Bess. Elsewhere she has sung the title roles in Carmen (Kentish Opera) and La Cenerentola (High Time Opera); Rosina The Barber of Seville (Opera South) Rossweisse Die Walküre (Grange Park Opera); Olga Eugene Onegin (Opera Up Close, Opera South East, Mid Wales Opera (cover)); Dorabella Così Fan Tutte (Baseless Fabric Theatre); Cherubino The Marriage of Figaro, and 3rd Lady The Magic Flute (both Opera Up Close). She is a regular extra chorister for The Royal Opera House, ENO and Opera North.

Felicity is in demand for solo oratorio, music education projects and consort/session work, and is delighted to be a regular part of Baseless Fabric’s Learning and Participation Projects. Read more

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Cast Announced for our Carmen R&D!

Tomorrow marks the start of our research and development workshop for our latest re-imagining, Carmen. This follows on from our acclaimed Die Fledermaus (4 stars The Guardian & The Stage) and Cosi Fan Tutte (Best Opera Production Finalist, OffWestEnd Awards). Over the course of 3 days we will be exploring our version of the piece, with a new modern English libretto by Joanna Turner, and score for violin, accordion and bassoon arranged by Leo Geyer.

Our work will culminate in a free sharing at 4.30pm at Lantern Arts Centre. If you’d like to attend you can sign up for tickets here. Read more

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Care Home Concerts Return!

Claire & Elspeth

Following the success of our concerts in September 2020, our covid-safe Care Home Concerts are returning this May! Thanks to the generosity of Wimbledon Foundation and Merton Giving, we will be performing for residents and staff from the gardens and carparks of care homes across Wandsworth and Merton.

We are thrilled that Soprano Claire Wild and Pianist Elspeth Wilkes will be returning to deliver these concerts with us. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram where we’ll be posting throughout the project.

Read more

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Covid Safe Care home concerts

During late September/early October 2020 we headed to seven different care homes across Wandsworth and Merton to provide a concert to their residents and staff to try and bring some musical joy and lift spirits during these difficult times of Covid 19. Kindly funded by Wimbledon Foundation, Merton Giving and Sylvia Waddilove Foundation we performed outside in the car parks and gardens of care homes so that residents and staff could safely enjoy our socially distanced performance. Check out our video for a peek at what we got up to! Read more

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Ready to perform in the carpark!

This week we are kicking off our opera care homes project! Soprano Claire Wild and Pianist Elspeth Wilkes with a small team are visiting a number of different care homes in Merton & Wandsworth. We’re going to be Covid-19 safe with our team working in car parks and gardens at the care homes and have handgel, masks and thermometers at the ready!

 

Claire Wild – Soprano

Claire Wild attended the Royal Northern College of Music‚ sponsored by the Peter Moores Foundation and the Musicians Benevolent Fund. She won the Webster Booth Award‚ the James Oncken Song Prize and the Frost Brownson Award.      

Highlights in recent seasons include Lilli Vanessi / Katharine in Kiss Me, Kate and Elle La voix humaine for Welsh National Opera, Susanna Le nozze di Figaro for Regents Opera and Petra in A Little Night Music for Opera Project at West Green House, Welsh National Opera as Emma in Khovanshchina and Garsington Opera as Caridad The Skating Rink, a newly commissioned opera by David Sawer.

Concert repertoire includes Elijah, Messiah‚ Carmina Burana, Bach St Matthew Passion, Mozart C Minor Mass. She has performed Dallapicolla Commiato and Stravinsky Pulcinella (Royal Northern Sinfonia) and Christmas and New Year Galas (Raymond Gubbay, Orchestra of Opera North, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and London Concert Orchestra) and Messiah (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra). Read more

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#TeamDieFledermaus

So that you can get to know #TeamDieFledermaus we thought we’d ask our brilliant singers a few questions about their characters:

 

What would your character have in their supermarket shopping trolley?

Falke: Vodka and crisps

Rosalinde: Nappies, formula, Pinot Grigio

Eisenstein: Stella and nappies

Adele: Smashed avocado, honey flavoured lockets, sugar free red bull Read more

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Die Fledermaus first road trip!

So after the excitement of our young people’s workshops and our two school parallel productions for Die Fledermaus getting underway, we’re now pleased to tell you about our sessions for local elderly groups across Merton and Wandsworth!

Because our unique street opera concept means that audience members need to be able to stand for most of the performances and walk around to follow the story of our characters around the high street, it means it’s not suitable for those less physically able. So this means that we also go into local elderly organisations and run sessions for them so that they can also engage with our work.

We’re thrilled that shortly we’ll be running sessions at old friends including Merton & Morden Guild and Friends in St Helier, who we previously worked with for Drifting Dragons and A Secret Life as well as going to new organisations including the Alzheimer’s Society.

Our brilliant singers Claire Wild, Abigail Kelly and David Horton will sing a couple of arias for the groups accompanied on piano by Juliane Gallant and Giles Kennedy, talk to them about their work as professional opera singers and pianists while Astrid will talk about the company and show edited filming of the Die Fledermaus Research & Development and our previous Cosi Fan Tutte Street Opera.

We’ll be back in touch soon to let you know how the sessions go and our plans to run further sessions later on in the year! Read more

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So which superhero are you?

We had a great time in our Research & Development rehearsals and sharing last week. Thank you to everyone who came along to see what we’ve been up to so far and give feedback. As well as working hard on the music, staging the scenes and making sure the storyline is clear we also asked our singers a few questions to help you get to know them….

Die Fledermaus R&D

We have a superhero theme to Die Fledermaus. If you could be any superhero who would you be and why?

Claire Wild: I want to be the invisible one from Fantastic Four for a million reasons really, but mostly to be sneaky and overhear conversations.

David Horton: Nightcrawler because he can teleport and is super agile and I’m neither of those things!

Alistair Ollerenshaw: Spiderman – to be super agile and be able to swing from buildings.

Abigail Kelly: Scarlet Witch as she is possibly the most powerful being in the Marvel universe. Read more

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