Following on from the success of both our full re-imagined Carmen production this summer and also our successful concerts for carehomes and local elderly organisations over the last couple of years, we’ve had a brilliant week visiting Merton & Wandsworth organisations for a concert as part of our Carmen 2022 programme of activities.

It’s been such fun visiting both carehomes that we’ve developed a relationship with over Covid & also going back to organisations such as Wimbledon Guild and Katherine Low Settlement that we’ve not been to since pre-Covid. And we’ve made friends with a couple of new places to – Hestia in Tooting and Sparkle in Putney. It’s been lovely time seeing old friends including the amazing 102 year old Sheila and meeting new people like Peter with his encyclopaedic knowledge of music. We even had some nursery children join in with their grandfriends at Sparkle who run intergenerational activities.

We were also delighted to welcome 2 new practitioners to this area of our work – the lovely baritone Philip Smith (Don Alfonso in our Cosi Fan Tutte & Escamillo in our Carmen R&D) and brilliant pianist Yllka Istrefi. They delighted the audiences with a variety of pieces from opera, musical theatre, classical songs, piano solos and of course a bit of Baseless Fabric’s re-imagined Carmen!

We had a fantastic time performing these concerts and to hear so many people joining in with singing and clapping along to ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ and ‘On The Street Where You Live’. We even had the Sparkle nursery children marching to Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Vagabond’ and pretending to be fish for Schubert’s ‘Die Forelle’! Big smiles all round!