Opera a la Carte is a UK-based chamber opera company located in London. It was founded in 1993 by its present General Director, Nicholas Heath, who was a member of the chorus of the Royal Opera from 1993 to 2006.
The United Kingdom (UK), officially the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and sometimes referred to as Britain, is a sovereign country located off the north-western coast of the European mainland. The United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom that shares a land border with another sovereign state, the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east, the English Channel to the south and the Celtic Sea to the south-west, giving it the 12th-longest coastline in the world. The Irish Sea lies between Great Britain and Ireland. With an area of 242,500 square kilometres (93,600 sq mi), the United Kingdom is the 78th-largest sovereign state in the world. It is also the 22nd-most populous country, with an estimated 66.0 million inhabitants in 2017.
Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers, with one performer to a part. However, by convention, it usually does not include solo instrument performances.
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.
Since 1996, its wide range of operas performed runs from La traviata to the 2011 season Rigoletto taking in the popular Mozart operas such as Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro and those of Puccini, such as Tosca and La boheme .
La traviata is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi set to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. It is based on La Dame aux camélias (1852), a play adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas fils. The opera was originally titled Violetta, after the main character. It was first performed on 6 March 1853 at the La Fenice opera house in Venice.
Rigoletto is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. The Italian libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave based on the play Le roi s'amuse by Victor Hugo. Despite serious initial problems with the Austrian censors who had control over northern Italian theatres at the time, the opera had a triumphant premiere at La Fenice in Venice on 11 March 1851.
Don Giovanni is an opera in two acts with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It is based on the legends of Don Juan, a fictional libertine and seducer. It was premiered by the Prague Italian opera at the National Theater, now called the Estates Theatre, on 29 October 1787. Da Ponte's libretto was billed as a dramma giocoso, a common designation of its time that denotes a mixing of serious and comic action. Mozart entered the work into his catalogue as an opera buffa. Although sometimes classified as comic, it blends comedy, melodrama and supernatural elements.
There are more thrills and spills in a terrific, tiny- budget “Tosca” from Opera a la Carte..... Nicholas Heath’s lusty production shows that the greater the risk, the greater the rewards. [Bloomberg News]
Gilbert and Sullivan refers to the Victorian-era theatrical partnership of the dramatist W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and the composer Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) and to the works they jointly created. The two men collaborated on fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896, of which H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado are among the best known.
Tosca is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 14 January 1900. The work, based on Victorien Sardou's 1887 French-language dramatic play, La Tosca, is a melodramatic piece set in Rome in June 1800, with the Kingdom of Naples's control of Rome threatened by Napoleon's invasion of Italy. It contains depictions of torture, murder and suicide, as well as some of Puccini's best-known lyrical arias.
Richard D'Oyly Carte was an English talent agent, theatrical impresario, composer and hotelier during the latter half of the Victorian era. He built two of London's theatres and a hotel empire, while also establishing an opera company that ran continuously for over a hundred years and a management agency representing some of the most important artists of the day.
The Canadian Opera Company (COC) is an opera company in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the largest opera company in Canada and one of the largest producers of opera in North America. The COC performs in its own opera house, the Four Seasons Centre. For forty years until April 2006, the COC had performed at the O'Keefe Centre.
The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company is a professional light opera company that staged Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas nearly year-round in the UK and sometimes toured in Europe, North America and elsewhere, from the 1870s until 1982. The company was revived for short seasons and tours from 1988 to 2003, and with Scottish Opera it later co-produced two productions.
The Royalty Theatre was a small London theatre situated at 73 Dean Street, Soho, which opened in 1840 as Miss Kelly's Theatre and Dramatic School and finally closed to the public in 1938. The architect was Samuel Beazley. The theatre's opening was ill-fated, and it was little used for a decade. It changed its name twice and was used by an opera company, amateur drama companies and for French pieces.
Ruggero Raimondi is an Italian bass-baritone opera singer who has also appeared in motion pictures.
Charles Donald Adams was an English opera singer and actor, best known for his performances in bass-baritone roles of the Savoy operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and his own company, Gilbert and Sullivan for All.
Helen Carte Boulter, also known as Helen Lenoir, was the second wife of impresario and hotelier Richard D'Oyly Carte. She is best known for her stewardship of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and Savoy Hotel from the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th century.
John Ayldon was an English opera singer and comic actor, best known for his performances in bass-baritone roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Steven Charles Pimlott was an English opera and theatre director, whose obituary in The Times hailed him as "one of the most versatile and inventive theatre directors of his generation". His output ran the gamut of the theatrical and operatic repertoire, from musicals, such as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, and popular plays, such as Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, through classics such as Shakespeare and Molière, to Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Sunday in the Park with George and Alexander Borodin's Prince Igor.
John Newport Caird is an English stage director and writer of plays, musicals and operas. He is an honorary associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, a regular director with the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain and the Principal Guest Director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm (Dramaten).
Geoffrey Richard Shovelton was an English singer and illustrator best known for his performances in leading tenor roles with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the 1970s.
Nicholas Heath is a British opera director.
This is a discography of Tosca, an opera by Giacomo Puccini. It premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 14 January 1900. Tosca has been one of the most frequently recorded operas, dating back to a nearly complete acoustical recording in 1918.
Anthony Laciura is an American operatic tenor, noted for his abilities as a comprimario, and actor. Born in New Orleans, he studied voice there with Charles Paddock, also the teacher of Ticho Parly.
NI Opera is an opera company founded in 2010 and based in Northern Ireland.
The DuPage Opera Theatre (DOT) is one of three professional opera companies located in the Chicago area, along with the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Chicago Opera Theater. Founded in 1977 as a resident, professional ensemble at the McAninch Arts Center at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, DuPage Opera has mounted several hundred performances since its inception.
Thomas Lawlor is an Irish opera singer. In the 1960s, he became known for his performances in mostly baritone roles of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. In the 1970s and 1980s, he performed over 60 operatic roles, usually as a bass-baritone, with various British opera companies. He was also a director in the opera department of the Royal Academy of Music and at Trinity College of Music. In later years, he moved to the US, where he continues to perform, direct and teach.
Stefanos Lazaridis was a stage designer, best known for his work in opera. Originally intended for a business career, he studied stage design in London, and was quickly in demand in theatres and opera houses, working with John Copley and other directors.
