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OperaUpClose
OperaUpClose is a national touring opera company, led by Artistic Director Flora McIntosh, The company was founded in 2009 to produce its début production, Robin Norton-Hale's Olivier Award-winning adaptation of Puccini's ''La bohème'' at The Cock Tavern Theatre. OperaUpClose produce new English language versions of the standard repertoire and World Premieres of new operas. Of the standard works, ''La bohème'' stands out as having been successful in runs for extended periods and has transferred to a West End location. Since being founded in 2009 OperaUpClose has produced twenty-five operas: six world premieres of contemporary operas and nineteen classic operas in newly commissioned chamber orchestrations and English librettos. Their production of ''La Bohème'' won the 2011 Olivier Award for Best Opera Production and the WhatsOnStage.com Award for Best Off-West End production; and their world premiere of The Blank Canvas won the 2015 Off West End Award for Best Opera. Bet ...
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The Cock Tavern Theatre
The Cock Tavern Theatre was a pub theatre located in Kilburn, London, Kilburn in the north-west of London. The venue specialised in new works and critical revivals. Resident companies Good Night Out Presents and OperaUpClose were also based at the venue. It shut in 2011, due to health and safety problems regarding the Victorian staircases that serviced the theatre. History The Cock Tavern Theatre was founded in January 2009 in the former first floor function room of The Cock Tavern by Adam Spreadbury-Maher, who is currently the theatre's artistic director. Its first production, Shakespeare's ''The Tempest'', premiered on 4 February 2009 directed by Simon Beyer. The theatre was frequently noted for the intimate and authentic experience provided by the backdrop of the upstairs room at the Cock Tavern.Gardner, LynReview: ''The Backroom'' ''The Guardian'', 27 March 2009 Productions were also staged in the bar itself as well as on the first-floor outside terrace. The Cock Tavern Thea ...
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Robin Norton-Hale
Robin Norton-Hale (born 28 March 1980) is an English writer and director for opera and theatre. She is the Artistic Director of OperaUpClose, having founded the company alongside Adam Spreadbury-Maher and Ben Cooper in October 2009 and was previously Artist in Residence at Oxford Playhouse. She studied English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford and was a Clore Cultural Leadership Fellow (2013/14). Career For OperaUpClose Norton-Hale has written new English librettos and directed productions including ''La Bohème'' (Soho Theatre, Cock Tavern Theatre and King's Head Theatre), winner of the 2011 Olivier Award for Best Opera,http://www.olivierawards.com/news/view/item115080/la-boheme-wins-best-new-opera-production/ and Best Off-West End Production in the 2011 Whatsonstage.com Awards; a production of ''Carmen'' in partnerships with the End Violence Against Women Coalition (“radical… a gripping, thought-provoking achievement” WhatsOnStage); ''Mary, Queen of Scots'' in partn ...
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La Bohème
''La bohème'' (; ) is an opera in four acts,Puccini called the divisions ''quadri'', ''tableaux'' or "images", rather than ''atti'' (acts). composed by Giacomo Puccini between 1893 and 1895 to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based on ''Scènes de la vie de bohème'' (1851) by Henri Murger. The story is set in Paris around 1830 and shows the Bohemian lifestyle (known in French as "") of a poor seamstress and her artist friends. The world premiere of ''La bohème'' was in Turin on 1 February 1896 at the Teatro Regio, conducted by the 28-year-old Arturo Toscanini. Since then, ''La bohème'' has become part of the standard Italian opera repertory and is one of the most frequently performed operas worldwide. In 1946, fifty years after the opera's premiere, Toscanini conducted a commemorative performance of it on radio with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. A recording of the performance was later released by RCA Victor on vinyl record, tape and compact disc. ...
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Keith Burstein
Keith Burstein born 1957 as Keith Burston (the anglicised form adopted by his father of the surname, which Burstein later dropped) is an English composer, conductor and music theorist with Russian family origins. He is noted for his fervent championing of tonal music as a valid contemporary composing style. Musical approach and philosophy (including theory of "Super Tonality") Keith Burstein's early musical approach was informed by the culture of atonalism in which he was educated at the Royal College of Music, and his early compositions were written in the atonal style. Burstein made a dramatic shift towards composing tonally during the late 1980s. In a 2002 interview with ''The Independent'' newspaper, he reflected "What had happened to me was a sort of Damascene conversion, I suppose. I suddenly saw that atonalism was a dead end. Once you accept that melody is everywhere, and always has been, in folk music and pop and rock, you see that it's not reactionary to write a tune." ...
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Kings Place
Kings Place is a building in London’s Kings Cross area, providing music and visual arts venues combined with seven floors of office space. It has housed the editorial offices of ''The Guardian'' newspaper since December 2008 and is the former headquarters of Network Rail and CGI. Overview Kings Place was a commercial development providing 26,000 sq m of office space. Construction on the site began in 2005 and was completed in summer 2008; the opening festival started on 1 October 2008. In late 2008 the building became the home for ''The Guardian'' and ''The Observer'' newspapers. Kings Place houses the first public concert hall to be newly built in central London since the completion of the Barbican Centre concert hall in 1982. ( Cadogan Hall and LSO St Luke's were adapted from old buildings in that period.) It has a range of facilities for performance, exhibition and education. The music, arts and restaurant areas are arranged around public spaces which form a central ...
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Opera Company
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librettist and incorporates a number of the performing arts, such as acting, scenery, costume, and sometimes dance or ballet. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble, which since the early 19th century has been led by a conductor. Although musical theatre is closely related to opera, the two are considered to be distinct from one another. Opera is a key part of the Western classical music tradition. Originally understood as an entirely sung piece, in contrast to a play with songs, opera has come to include numerous genres, including some that include spoken dialogue such as '' Singspiel'' and '' Opéra comique''. In traditional number opera, singers employ two styles of ...
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The Turn Of The Screw
''The Turn of the Screw'' is an 1898 horror novella by Henry James which first appeared in serial format in ''Collier's Weekly'' (January 27 – April 16, 1898). In October 1898, it was collected in ''The Two Magics'', published by Macmillan in New York City and Heinemann in London. The novella follows a governess who, caring for two children at a remote estate, becomes convinced that the grounds are haunted. ''The Turn of the Screw'' is considered a work of both Gothic and horror fiction. In the century following its publication, critical analysis of the novella has undergone several major transformations. Initial reviews regarded it only as a frightening ghost story, but, in the 1930s, some critics suggested that the supernatural elements were figments of the governess' imagination. In the early 1970s, the influence of structuralism resulted in an acknowledgement that the text's ambiguity was its key feature. Later approaches incorporated Marxist and feminist thinking. T ...
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The Marriage Of Figaro
''The Marriage of Figaro'' ( it, Le nozze di Figaro, links=no, ), K. 492, is a ''commedia per musica'' (opera buffa) in four acts composed in 1786 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with an Italian libretto written by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 1 May 1786. The opera's libretto is based on the 1784 stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, '' La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro'' ("The Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro"). It tells how the servants Figaro and Susanna succeed in getting married, foiling the efforts of their philandering employer Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna and teaching him a lesson in fidelity. Considered one of the greatest operas ever written, it is a cornerstone of the repertoire and appears consistently among the top ten in the Operabase list of most frequently performed operas. In 2017, BBC News Magazine asked 172 opera singers to vote for the best operas ever written. ''The Marriage of Figaro'' came in first out of ...
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Arts Council England
Arts Council England is an arm's length non-departmental public body of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. It is also a registered charity. It was formed in 1994 when the Arts Council of Great Britain was divided into three separate bodies for England, Scotland and Wales. The arts funding system in England underwent considerable reorganisation in 2002 when all of the regional arts boards were subsumed into Arts Council England and became regional offices of the national organisation. Arts Council England is a government-funded body dedicated to promoting the performing, visual and literary arts in England. Since 1994, Arts Council England has been responsible for distributing lottery funding. This investment has helped to transform the building stock of arts organisations and to create much additional high-quality arts activity. On 1 October 2011 the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council was subsumed into the Arts Council in England and they assumed the re ...
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Manifest Destiny
Manifest destiny was a cultural belief in the 19th century in the United States, 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand across North America. There were three basic tenets to the concept: * The special virtues of the American people and their institutions * The mission of the United States to redeem and remake the Western United States, West in the image of the History of agrarianism#United States, agrarian Eastern United States, East * An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty Historians have emphasized that "manifest destiny" was always contested; many endorsed the idea, but the large majority of Whig Party (United States), Whigs and many prominent Americans (such as Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant) rejected the concept. Historian Daniel Walker Howe writes, "American imperialism did not represent an American consensus; it provoked bitter dissent within the national polity while the ''Whigs'' saw America's moral missio ...
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Edward Dick
Edward Dick is a British theatre director. Biography He graduated from Oxford University in 2001 and trained as Declan Donnellan's assistant at Cheek by Jowl. He has directed productions, most notably of plays by Shakespeare, in theatres around the world. In 2009 he directed a revival of Philip Ridley's '' The Fastest Clock in the Universe'' at Hampstead Theatre starring Jaime Winstone. In 2008 he directed Benjamin Britten's opera ''The Rape of Lucretia'' at Aldeburgh, and in 2011 he directed a new opera by Tarik O'Regan at the Royal Opera House in London. His short film ''An Act of Love'' premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2010. On 2 August 2016, Dick is set to direct an episode of the BBC One BBC One is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network owned and operated by the BBC. It is the corporation's flagship network and is known for broadcasting mainstream programming, which includes BBC News television bulletins, ... medical dra ...
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Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976, aged 63) was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera '' Peter Grimes'' (1945), the '' War Requiem'' (1962) and the orchestral showpiece ''The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra'' (1945). Born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, the son of a dentist, Britten showed talent from an early age. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London and privately with the composer Frank Bridge. Britten first came to public attention with the '' a cappella'' choral work '' A Boy was Born'' in 1934. With the premiere of ''Peter Grimes'' in 1945, he leapt to international fame. Over the next 28 years, he wrote 14 more operas, establishing himself as one of the leading 20th-century composers in the genre. In addition to large-sca ...
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