Knight Crew is an opera in two acts composed by Julian Philips with a libretto by Nicky Singer. The opera is based on the novel of the same name, also by Singer, which retells the legend of King Arthur in a modern gangland setting. [1]
Opera is a form of theatre in which music has a leading role and the parts are taken by singers, but is distinct from musical theater. Such a "work" 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.
Julian Philips is a British composer. Philips' works have been performed at major music festivals, including The Proms, Tanglewood, Three Choirs Festival, at the Wigmore Hall, South Bank Centre and Berlin Philharmonic Chamber Music Hall and by international artists such as Gerald Finley, Dawn Upshaw, Sir Thomas Allen, the Vertavo String Quartet, the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, the BBC orchestras and the Aurora Orchestra.
A libretto is the text used in, or intended for, an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata or musical. The term libretto is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as the Mass, requiem and sacred cantata, or the story line of a ballet.
The opera premièred on 3 March 2010 at Glyndebourne Festival Opera. [2] The project was filmed for a television series, presented by Gareth Malone, Gareth Malone Goes to Glyndebourne, which aired on the BBC on 1 July 2010. Knight Crew is published by Edition Peters.
Glyndebourne Festival Opera is an annual opera festival held at Glyndebourne, an English country house near Lewes, in East Sussex, England.
Gareth Edmund Malone is an English choirmaster and broadcaster, self-described as an "animateur, presenter and populariser of choral singing". He is best known for his television appearances in programmes such as The Choir, which focus on singing and introducing choral music to new participants. Malone was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours, for services to music.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters are at Broadcasting House in Westminster, London, and it is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees. It employs over 20,950 staff in total, 16,672 of whom are in public sector broadcasting. The total number of staff is 35,402 when part-time, flexible, and fixed-contract staff are included.
Knight Crew was created by Philips as part of his four year creative residency at Glyndebourne from 2006 to 2010. Philips was Glyndebourne's first ever composer-in-residence, a residency set up as an AHRC-funded collaborative doctorate between Glyndebourne and Sussex University. Along with Knight Crew, Philips created two other operas as part of his residency: The Yellow Sofa (2009) [3] based on the novella Alves & Co. by Eça de Queiros, and a site-specific promenade opera Followers (2006–11), with writer Simon Christmas. [4]
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) was established in April 2005 as successor to the Arts and Humanities Research Board and is a British research council; non-departmental public body that provides approximately £102 million from the government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from languages and law, archaeology and English literature to design and creative and performing arts. In any one year, the AHRC makes approximately 700 research awards and around 1,350 postgraduate awards. Awards are made after a rigorous peer review process, to ensure that only applications of the highest quality are funded.
Alves & Co. is a novella by José Maria de Eça de Queirós, also known as Eça de Queiroz. It was only first published in Portuguese in 1925, 25 years after the author's death. The first English version, Alves and Co., was translated by Robert M. Fedorchek and published by the University Press of America in 1988. This was followed by a translation titled The Yellow Sofa, by John Vetch and published by Carcanet Press in 1993. The latest translation, by Margaret Jull Costa, was published by Dedalus Books in 2012, together with six short stories by the same author. Alves & Co. is a comic novella on the theme of infidelity and its consequences.
