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New Chamber Opera is a professional opera company located in Oxford, United Kingdom. [1] It specialises in the fields of chamber opera and music theatre, and produces rarely performed works from the Baroque era to the present. It is a member of the Opera and Music Theatre Forum. New Chamber Opera has received financial support from the Arts Council of Great Britain and The National Lottery.
New Chamber Opera was founded in 1990 by Michael Burden and Gary Cooper. [2] Burden serves as its director. The company has staged more than thirty productions, including Handel's Orlando , Serse and Amadigi di Gaula , Cimarosa's The Secret Marriage and Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Il Rè pastore. [3] The company has an associated Baroque orchestra, The Band of Instruments.
Appearances outside Oxford have included concerts and productions at the Tudeley and Southwark Festivals, several performances at London's South Bank Centre, and at the National Gallery. With its contemporary music ensemble Phoenix, it has performed several pieces of twentieth-century music theatre including Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King, Vessalii Icones, Notre Dames des Fleurs, and Miss Donnithorne's Maggot, and Harrison Birtwistle's Down by the Greenwood Side.
New Chamber Opera has frequently recovered and performed lesser known works, particularly those of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. To this end its members have prepared new editions and commissioned new translations. In 2008 and 2009, New Chamber Opera took part in a national fundraising campaign led by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, to prevent the only known manuscript of the English version of Francesco Cavalli's opera, Erismena , from being exported to the United States. [4] New Chamber Opera subsequently staged the opera using a new edition by Michael Burden, and toured the production to the Opera at West Green House.
Its music director is Steven Devine, and its singing patron is James Bowman.
The focus of the company's professional activities is the Summer Opera, an annual garden staging in the Warden's Garden at New College, and accompanied by The Band of Instruments. The garden, a natural theatrical space surrounded by stone walls with an 18th-century stone summer house, is located between Queen's Lane and All Souls College.
The Band of Instruments, founded by Michael Burden and Gary Cooper in 1995, first performed with the Choir of New College, Oxford. The Band's leader is Caroline Balding. The Band occasionally performs as an independent ensemble, and always accompanies the Summer Opera.
The Band of Instruments have also recorded the cycle of the four seasons concertos by the Italian composer Giovanni Antonio Guido, Scherzi armonici sopra le quattro stagioni dell’anno (‘Harmonics above the four seasons of the year’). Guido, who was serving as maître de la musique for the Duke of Orléans, had been living and working in France from about 1703. KLassik.com commented that ‘Caroline Balding, Matthew Truscott and Sarah Moffatt play perfectly synchronized in timbre and expression’, while CD Classico Italy described it as ‘a fine and authentic execution by the violinist Caroline Balding’.
New Chamber Opera's recordings have mostly appeared on the Gaudeamus label, with Academy Sound and Vision. These include music by Purcell from the Gresham Manuscript, and Music for Ceremonial Oxford. It has frequently recorded French Baroque music, recording stage music from Charpentier's output, and the only complete recording of Rameau's cantatas.
The company also operates the New Chamber Opera Studio, [5] which stages two student productions annually and a recital series of twenty-four concerts in which they take part. Recent productions have included Orpheus in the Underworld, by Offenbach, in 2012 [6] and La Calisto, by Francesco Cavalli, in 2014 [7]
In 2016, the company gave the world premiere of "Rothschild's Violin" by Marco Galvani in the antechapel of Oxford's New College. [8]
The members of New Chamber Opera Studio also prepare or organise the live content of the University's visiting chairs of opera. The visiting professors have included Thomas Allen, Graham Vick, John Eliot Gardiner, Renée Fleming, Jane Glover, and Katie Mitchell.
New Chamber Opera also part-funds two Repetiteur Scholarships every three years to St Catherine's College, Oxford, or to a scholar from another college. The senior scholar serves as the Studio's director. The award has recently been held by:
This list of productions follows the information in the company's website. [9]
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