LIVE MUSIC SWITCHED ON….

WITH THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF OPERA NORTH'S NEW PROGRAMME

LIVE MUSIC SWITCHED ON….

 

New events have been added to Switch ON; Opera North’s programme of new indoor performance, outdoor events and digital projects to take place this Autumn. Despite the ever-changing landscape for live performance, Opera North re-affirms its commitment to share music with communities across the North, live or digitally, in theatres, concert halls or projected onto buildings in city centres. The Company is determined to make music with and for audiences in communities across the North of England.

More than 14,000 tickets will be available for events in the Switch ON season, at over 40 different venues, with 79% of tickets either free, pay-as-you-feel, or priced at under £15.

A live streamed concert from Leeds Town Hall, Switch ON: Live from Leeds, celebrating the start of this season and previewing upcoming highlights, will be available to watch live on Opera North’s website and YouTube channel at 7pm on Wed 30 September.

New indoor performances added to the season’s line up include a double-bill of Handel’s pastoral opera Acis and Galatea and Brecht and Weill’s acerbic ‘sung ballet’, Seven Deadly Sins, which will be performed at Leeds Playhouse from 11-21 November, following on from Opera North’s co-production of work with Leeds Playhouse in the Connecting Voices festival during October.

One of the UK’s most exciting choreographers and contemporary dance artists, Gary Clarke directs and choreographs Seven Deadly Sins, returning to Opera North following his work on Weill’s Street Scene earlier this year. James Holmes conducts a cast including Canadian mezzo Wallis Giunta  as Anna, and dancer Shelley Eva Haden, a graduate of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance who recently co-choreographed and performed in Swan Lake Bath Ballet, filmed in lockdown for BBC Arts ‘Culture in Quarantine’, as her alter ego.

In December we plan to mount a concert tour of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, to open at Leeds Town Hall with four performances in our home city before touring to other venues in the North. At this time we are unable to confirm on sale dates for these performances.

Touring to smaller scale venues in villages, towns and cities across the North, a newly devised Whistle Stop Opera: Cinderella offers a relaxed and fun introduction to opera through the music of different composers’ takes on the same fairy tale. Devised and directed by John Savournin for three singers and accordion, these versatile and hugely enjoyable pop-up style performances will bring live performance back indoors in community settings across the region once again.

Gradually returning to a symphonic concert programme, the Orchestra of Opera North will also perform a concert at Leeds Town Hall as part of the Leeds International Concert Season. Violinist / soloist Chloe Hanslip directs a programme of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and their twentieth century tango counterparts, Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, on Saturday 3 October.

Ensembles drawn from the Orchestra of Opera North will also perform six lunchtime chamber concerts at Leeds Town Hall on Fridays from 16 October, and the Company additionally hopes to restart concert performances in Huddersfield and Dewsbury as part of the Kirklees Concert Season in the New Year.

Artist and filmmaker Matthew Robins’ new animation re-interpreting Act III of Puccini’s La bohème will be projected in found spaces in cities across the North in the run up to Christmas. This dramatic and intensely moving 20 minute short film features a soundtrack newly recorded by the Orchestra and Chorus of Opera North and guest soloists.

In Leeds, audiences will be able to experience the film projected at the Corn Exchange, on campus at The University of Leeds, and at outdoor locations across Leeds city centre.

For dates when tickets for the performances are available and all the latest information when available visit operanorth.co.uk

 

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