A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

In Spring 2022, I co-conceived and directed a series of staged opera galas for a co-project between Nevill Holt Opera, the Royal Opera House and the David Ross Education Trust. Themed around magic and fairy-tales, our Night at the Opera included music and scenes from L’elisir d’amore, La Cenerentola, Hansel and Gretel, Rusalka and The Merry Widow, performed by primary school children around the country alongside professional opera singers and instrumentalists.

Director and writer – Jonathan Ainscough

Conductor – Nic Chalmers

Soprano – Philippa Boyle/Fflur Wyn/Fiona Finsbury

Mezzo-soprano – Joanna Harries

Associate Director – Lily Dyble

Director’s note (from the programme): The starting-point for this project was a wonderful collection of excerpts from Humperdinck’s 1890s opera of Hansel and Gretel, adapted for young voices by the Royal Opera House’s Learning and Participation team. We knew these songs would form the centrepiece of our Nights at the Opera and, as we started to explore what other pieces of opera could sit around them, the idea of continuing in the theme of fairy-tales was too exciting to resist. The world of magic and folklore has long been a source of inspiration to composers, from Henry Purcell adapting Shakespeare for The Fairy Queen in 1692 to Stephen Sondheim mashing up Grimm Tales for Into the Woods in 1986, so we had plenty of glorious material from which to choose!

Tonight, our brilliant school-children, opera singers and instrumentalists will be taking you on a journey through a host of magical stories, from King Arthur to Cinderella, from Hansel and Gretel to the Little Mermaid, ending in the Eastern European legends of a lonely wood-nymph known only as the Vilja. When you open a book of fairy-tales, you never know where you might end up…

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