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Ella Marchment
Ella Marchment (born 30 May 1992) is a British opera director, artistic director, and an associate professor. She is a co-founder of the campaign charity SWAP'ra, Supporting Women and Parents in Opera, and the artistic director of Opera Festival of Chicago, and Opera in the Rock, Arkansas. She previously founded the opera company Helios Collective. She has directed the International Opera Awards since 2017. Career In addition to directing engagements in Europe and the US, Marchment is artistic director of the Opera Festival of Chicago and Opera in the Rock in Arkansas, Creative Associate and co-founder of SWAP’ra, and Director of Opera and Associate Professor at Shenandoah Conservatory. She created ''Toi Toi'', a festival series of operatic club nights held at the CLF Art Cafe in Peckham, London; and ''Formations Masterclasses'', a series of workshops that commissioned and staged new operas, with sessions led by figures from the opera world including Janis Kelly, Judith W ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hampshire
Hampshire (, ; abbreviated to Hants) is a ceremonial county, ceremonial and non-metropolitan county, non-metropolitan counties of England, county in western South East England on the coast of the English Channel. Home to two major English cities on its south coast, Southampton and Portsmouth, Hampshire is the 9th-most populous county in England. The county town of Hampshire is Winchester, located in the north of the county. The county is bordered by Dorset to the south-west, Wiltshire to the north-west, Berkshire to the north, Surrey to the north-east, and West Sussex to the south east. The county is geographically diverse, with upland rising to and mostly south-flowing rivers. There are areas of downland and marsh, and two national parks: the New Forest National Park, New Forest and part of the South Downs National Park, South Downs, which together cover 45 per cent of Hampshire. Settled about 14,000 years ago, Hampshire's recorded history dates to Roman Britain, when its chi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Saxton
Robert Saxton (born 8 October 1953 in London) is a British composer. Biography Robert Saxton was born in London and started composing at the age of six. He was educated at Bryanston School. Guidance in early years from Benjamin Britten and Elisabeth Lutyens was followed by periods of study at Cambridge and Oxford Universities with Robin Holloway and Robert Sherlaw Johnson respectively, and also with Luciano Berio. Saxton won the Gaudeamus International Composers Award in the Netherlands at age 21. In 1986, he was awarded the Fulbright Arts Fellowship to the USA, where he was in residence at Princeton and an assistant to Oliver Knussen at Tanglewood. In 1995 he co-directed the composers' course on Hoy, with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. He has directed the composers' course at Dartington International Summer School on several occasions and was artistic director of Opera Lab. He has also been a regular member of the BBC TV 4 (digital) Proms broadcasting commentary team and was a memb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell (, rare: September 1659 – 21 November 1695) was an English composer. Purcell's style of Baroque music was uniquely English, although it incorporated Italian and French elements. Generally considered among the greatest English opera composers, Purcell is often linked with John Dunstaple and William Byrd as England's most important early music composers. No later native-born English composer approached his fame until Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, William Walton and Benjamin Britten in the 20th century. Life and work Early life Purcell was born in St Ann's Lane, Old Pye Street, Westminster – the area of London later known as Devil's Acre, a notorious slum – in 1659. Henry Purcell Senior, whose older brother Thomas Purcell was a musician, was a gentleman of the Chapel Royal and sang at the coronation of King Charles II of England. Henry the elder had three sons: Edward, Henry and Daniel. Daniel Purcell, the youngest of the b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the ''Gesamtkunstwerk'' ("total work of art"), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle ''Der Ring des Nibelungen'' (''The Ring of the Nibelung''). His compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Die Meistersinger Von Nürnberg
(; "The Master-Singers of Nuremberg"), WWV 96, is a music drama, or opera, in three acts, by Richard Wagner. It is the longest opera commonly performed, taking nearly four and a half hours, not counting two breaks between acts, and is traditionally not cut. With Hans von Bülow conducting, it was first performed on 21 June 1868 at the National Theatre Munich, National Theater in Munich, today home of Bavarian State Opera. The story is set in Nuremberg in the mid-16th century. At the time, Nuremberg was a free imperial city and one of the centers of the Renaissance in Northern Europe. The story revolves around the city's guild of ''Meistersinger'' (Master Singers), an association of amateur poets and musicians who were primarily Master craftsman, master craftsmen of various trades. The master singers had developed a craftsmanlike approach to music-making, with an intricate system of rules for composing and performing songs. The work draws much of its atmosphere from its depictio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (8 September 1934 – 14 March 2016) was an English composer and conductor, who in 2004 was made Master of the Queen's Music. As a student at both the University of Manchester and the Royal Manchester College of Music, Davies formed a group dedicated to contemporary music called the New Music Manchester with fellow students Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Elgar Howarth and John Ogdon. Davies’s compositions include eight works for the stage—from the monodrama ''Eight Songs for a Mad King'', which shocked the audience in 1969, to ''Kommilitonen!'', first performed in 2011—and ten symphonies, written between 1973 and 2013. As a conductor, Davies was artistic director of the Dartington International Summer School from 1979 to 1984 and associate conductor/composer with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from 1992 to 2002, holding the latter position with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra as well. Early life and education Davies was born in Holly Str ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eight Songs For A Mad King
''Eight Songs for a Mad King'' is a monodrama by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies with a libretto by Randolph Stow, based on words of George III. The work was written for the South-African actor Roy Hart and the composer's ensemble, the Pierrot Players. It was premiered on 22 April 1969. Lasting half an hour, it is scored for a baritone with an extraordinary command of extended techniques covering more than five octaves, and six players (Pierrot ensemble + percussion): *flute (doubling piccolo) *clarinet *percussion (1 player): railway whistle, snare drum, 2 suspended cymbals, foot cymbal, 2 wood blocks, 2 bass drums, chains, ratchet, tom-toms, tamtam, tambourine, rototoms, toy bird-calls, 2 temple blocks, wind chimes, crotales, sleigh bells, dulcimer, glockenspiel, steel bars, crow, didgeridoo, washboard *piano (doubling harpsichord) *violin *cello Extended techniques are also required by the instrumentalists: for example there is frequent use of flutter-tonguing and multiphonics fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edith Sitwell
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell (7 September 1887 – 9 December 1964) was a British poet and critic and the eldest of the three literary Sitwells. She reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents and lived much of her life with her governess. She never married but became passionately attached to Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle, to whom she was generous and helpful. Sitwell published poetry continuously from 1913, some of it abstract and set to music. With her dramatic style and exotic costumes, she was sometimes labelled a poseur, but her work was praised for its solid technique and painstaking craftsmanship. She was a recipient of the Benson Medal of the Royal Society of Literature. Early life Edith Louisa Sitwell was born in Scarborough, North Riding of Yorkshire, the oldest child and only daughter of Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet, of Renishaw Hall; he was an expert on genealogy and landscaping.Tim HarrisEccentr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Façade (entertainment)
''Façade'' is a series of poems by Edith Sitwell, best known as part of ''Façade – An Entertainment'' in which the poems are recited over an instrumental accompaniment by William Walton. The poems and the music exist in several versions. Sitwell began to publish some of the ''Façade'' poems in 1918, in the literary magazine ''Wheels''. In 1922 many of them were given an orchestral accompaniment by Walton, Sitwell's protégé. The "entertainment" was first performed in public on 12 June 1923 at the Aeolian Hall in London, and achieved both fame and notoriety for its unconventional form. Walton arranged two suites of his music for full orchestra. When Frederick Ashton made a ballet of ''Façade'' in 1931, Sitwell did not wish her poems to be part of it, and the orchestral arrangements were used. After Sitwell's death, Walton published supplementary versions of ''Façade'' for speaker and small ensemble using numbers dropped between the premiere and the publication of the f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English National Opera
English National Opera (ENO) is an opera company based in London, resident at the London Coliseum in St Martin's Lane. It is one of the two principal opera companies in London, along with The Royal Opera. ENO's productions are sung in English. The company's origins were in the late 19th century, when the philanthropist Emma Cons, later assisted by her niece Lilian Baylis, presented theatrical and operatic performances at the Old Vic, for the benefit of local people. Baylis subsequently built up both the opera and the theatre companies, and later added a ballet company; these evolved into the ENO, the Royal National Theatre and The Royal Ballet, respectively. Baylis acquired and rebuilt the Sadler's Wells theatre in north London, a larger house, better suited to opera than the Old Vic. The opera company grew there into a permanent ensemble in the 1930s. During the Second World War, the theatre was closed and the company toured British towns and cities. After the war, the comp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Parry (conductor)
David Parry (born 23 March 1949) is an English conductor who is particularly known for his work in opera. Described as "a man of the theatre with whom directors love to work; he is good with singers; he knows the British opera world like the back of his hand. He is a controversial and outspoken defender of the operatic form, and a passionate advocate of opera in English", his work includes a large discography of complete opera recordings of rarely performed works made on the Opera Rara and Chandos record labels, as well as works recorded with well-known British and European orchestras. Parry is also a member of the support staff of the Cardiff International Academy of Voice Early career Parry was educated at Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music in London. He explains how he became a conductor by way of wanting to be a singer: "Audrey Langford, who was a very important singing teacher in the 1960s and '70s, ran a rather good choir which she conducted herself, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Pountney
Sir David Willoughby Pountney (born 10 September 1947) is a British-Polish theatre and opera director and librettist internationally known for his productions of rarely performed operas and new productions of classic works. He has directed over ten world premières, including three by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies for whom he wrote the librettos of '' The Doctor of Myddfai'', '' Mr Emmet Takes a Walk'' and ''Kommilitonen!''Baumgartner (22 July 2009) Biography Pountney was born in Oxford and was a chorister at St John's College, Cambridge (1956-61). He was then educated near Oxford at Radley College (1961-66). And then returned to St John's College, Cambridge to read his degree. His first major breakthrough came in 1972 with his production of ''Káťa Kabanová'' for the Wexford Festival. From 1975 to 1980, he was the Director of Productions at Scottish Opera, and, from 1982 to 1993, Director of Productions at English National Opera, where he directed over twenty operas. From 199 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
