The Royal Opera House (ROH) is a historic opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply Covent Garden, after a previous use of the site. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet, and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. The first theatre on the site, the Theatre Royal (1732), served primarily as a playhouse for the first hundred years of its history. In 1734, the first ballet was presented. A year later, the first season of operas, by George Frideric Handel, began. Many of his operas and oratorios were specifically written for Covent Garden and had their premieres there.
The Wigmore Hall is a concert hall at 36 Wigmore Street, in west London. It was designed by Thomas Edward Collcutt and opened in 1901 as the Bechstein Hall; it is considered to have particularly good acoustics. It specialises in performances of chamber music, early music, vocal music and song recitals, and hosts over five hundred concerts each year, as well as a weekly concert broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
The Royal Ballet is a British internationally renowned classical ballet company, based at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, England. The largest of the five major ballet companies in Great Britain, the Royal Ballet was founded in 1931 by Dame Ninette de Valois. It became the resident ballet company of the Royal Opera House in 1946, and has purpose-built facilities within these premises. It was granted a royal charter in 1956, becoming recognised as Britain's flagship ballet company.
The Royal Opera is a British opera company based in central London, resident at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Along with English National Opera, it is one of the two principal opera companies in London. Founded in 1946 as the Covent Garden Opera Company, the company had that title until 1968. It brought a long annual season and consistent management to a house that had previously hosted short seasons under a series of impresarios. Since its inception, it has shared the Royal Opera House with the dance company now known as The Royal Ballet.
City of London Sinfonia (CLS) is an English chamber orchestra based in London. CLS is orchestra-in-residence at Opera Holland Park since 2004 and holds a residency at St Paul's Cathedral. CLS also performs regularly across the city of London in venues from East London clubs to traditional Central London concert halls. It is a registered charity under English law. CLS performs chamber orchestra and ensemble repertoire from the Baroque period to the present day, and has a programming focus on the human voice.
Glyndebourne Festival Opera is an annual opera festival held at Glyndebourne, an English country house near Lewes, in East Sussex, England.
Birmingham Opera Company is a professional opera company based in Birmingham, England, that specialises in innovative and avant-garde productions of the operatic repertoire, often in unusual venues.
Garsington Opera is an annual summer opera festival founded in 1989 by Leonard Ingrams. The Philharmonia Orchestra and The English Concert are its two resident orchestras. For 21 years it was held in the gardens of Ingrams's home at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire. Since 2011 the festival is held in Wormsley Park, the home of the Getty family near Stokenchurch in Buckinghamshire, England. After Ingrams's death in 2005 Anthony Whitworth-Jones became its General Director until 2013 when Douglas Boyd became artistic director.
Wexford Festival Opera is an opera festival that takes place in the town of Wexford in south-eastern Ireland during the months of October and November.
Michael Grandage CBE is a British theatre director and producer. He is currently Artistic Director of the Michael Grandage Company. From 2002 to 2012 he was Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse in London and from 2000 to 2005 he was Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres.
The King's Head Theatre, founded in 1970 by Dan Crawford, is an off-West End venue in London. It is the oldest operating pub theatre in the UK. In 2021, Mark Ravenhill became Artistic Director and the theatre focusses on producing LGBTQ+ work, work that is joyful, irreverent, colourful and queer.
Sarasota Opera is a professional opera company in Sarasota, Florida, USA, which was founded as the Asolo Opera Guild and, until 1974, presented a visiting company's productions. Between 1974 and 1979, it set about mounting its own productions in the same venue until, in 1979, it acquired the Edwards Theatre, which became the Sarasota Opera House in 1984. The house underwent a further renovation in 2008, creating a 1,119-seat venue.
Peter Robert Auty is an English operatic tenor who has worked with most of the major opera companies in Britain and a number of companies in continental Europe.
Long Beach Opera is a Southern California opera company serving the greater Los Angeles and Orange County metroplex. Founded in 1979, it is the oldest continually running opera company in the L.A. area. In June 2019 LBO presented the world premiere of The Central Park Five, an opera by Anthony Davis with libretto by Richard Wesley, about the Central Park jogger case. The opera won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in May 2020.
Grange Park Opera is a professional opera company and charity whose base is West Horsley Place in Surrey, England. Founded in 1998, the company staged an annual opera festival at The Grange, in Hampshire and in 2016–7, built a new opera house, the 'Theatre in the Woods', at West Horsley Place – the 350-acre estate inherited by author and broadcaster Bamber Gascoigne in 2014.
Cincinnati Opera is an American opera company based in Cincinnati, Ohio and the second oldest opera company in the United States. Beginning with its first season in 1920, Cincinnati Opera has produced operas in the summer months of June and July with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra providing orchestral accompaniment.
High House is the collective name for a group of historic buildings in Purfleet, Thurrock, Essex, which was used as a farm for hundreds of years, with a Grade II listed house and barn, but with the addition of one of the best dovecotes in Southern England, which is a Scheduled Ancient Monument and notable for its nest box array. This property includes the house, coachman's cottage, chaise house, stable, granary, barn, workshop, cart sheds, dovecote, and inner and outer walled gardens. Known by many names in its past, the farm has been called Le Vineyards, because grape vines were grown on one of its south facing slopes. Its current name comes from the fact that it is a house high on the hill, which commands great views over the River Thames.
Royal & Derngate is a theatre complex in the Cultural Quarter of Northampton, England, consisting of the Royal Theatre, Derngate Theatre and the Northampton Filmhouse. The Royal was built by theatre architect Charles J. Phipps and opened in 1884. Ninety-nine years later in 1983, Derngate, designed by RHWL, was built to the rear of the Royal. Whilst the two theatres were physically linked, they did not combine organisations until a formal merger in 1999; they are run by the Northampton Theatres Trust. The Royal Theatre, established as a producing house, has a capacity of 450 seats and since 1976 has been designated a Grade II listed building; Derngate Theatre seats a maximum of 1,200 and is a multi-purpose space in which the auditorium can be configured for a variety of events including theatre, opera, live music, dance, fashion and sports. The Northampton Filmhouse, an independent cinema built to the side of the complex, opened in 2013.
Timothy Sheader is a British theatre director. Sheader read Law with French at the University of Birmingham before moving into a career in theatre. Since 2007, he has been Artistic Director at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre.
Thomas de Mallet Burgess is a theatre, musical theatre, and opera director from the United Kingdom. He founded the Perth opera company Lost & Found, and was General Director of New Zealand Opera from 2018 to 2023 before selected as artistic director of Finnish National Opera.
