In February 2025 we're delighted to be returning to the Great Hall of Shaw House in Newbury for our next opera production.
It's planned for the weekend of 7-8 February; times to follow.
The opera we're performing is still a closely guarded secret (one way of looking at it!) but it shouldn't be long before it's announced on this page.
We presented Mozart's Seraglio in the Great Hall in 2023. That was a real milestone, being our first staged production since lockdown. The hall (below) proved just what was needed for a pasha's palace! — and in 2024, it transported Tales of Hoffmann audiences to Luther's Nuremberg tavern, to a Paris hotel de ville, to Venice in Giulietta's palazzo and to a town house in Munich.
The Great Hall in the moonlight: the thwarted escape from the Seraglio.
Our 2024 concert programme featured many much-loved opera favourites, and some that surely deserve to be, like the Prayer from Rossini's Moise and the introductory chorus from Verdi's Joan of Arc. The concert was co-ordinated by Duncan Powell, and led by Newbury-area talent: young conductor Theo Powell, and well-known pianist Oliver Williams.
Dates:
Thanks all round to accompanist and conductor!
In February. Shaw House's Great Hall proved as fine a setting for The Tales, set in four great European cities, as it had for Pasha Selim's palace the year before, when we presented Mozart's Seraglio.
After a string of comedy triumphs, Jacques Offenbach's last work was this strange opera fantastique from 1881, based on the writings of the German romantic poet E T A Hoffmann, and telling the story of his three failures in love, across sometimes dubious locations in four great European cities.
Audiences were all we hoped for at our two evening and one matinee performances.
This was our last pre-lockdown staged production. Together with Opera Unmasked, in January 2020 we presented 'Amahl and the Night Visitors', Menotti's beautiful one-act opera, AND a selection of Great American Songs, in St John's Church Newbury. All in one show!
They played:Amahl was marvellously sung and acted by 13-year old Edward Bennet, and the part of his mother, following illness in the company, was sung by Emily Kyte for two nights and Serenna Wagner for one. We were joined for the first time by members of Wantage Choral Society and Wantage Church Choir; and once again by dancers from the Karen Brind school of dance.
