Second Movement was founded in 2004 as a chamber opera ensemble performing unorthodox opera productions in unusual spaces. It is a registered charity with a mission to provide opportunities for talented composers, singers and other professionals starting their careers in opera, in non-standard repertoire, and to bring opera to new audiences, those with limited access to the performing arts and marginalised groups. Some of its productions have been UK stage premieres, including Emily Howard’s Zatopek! commissioned as part of the UK Cultural Olympiad in 2012. Second Movement has performed in venues ranging from the former music halls Hoxton Hall in London and Epstein (formerly Neptune) Theatre in Liverpool, to the Reduta palace in Brno, Czech Republic.
In 2011 Second Movement launched its ongoing programme Rough for Opera to provide opportunities for composers and performers new to opera, to present new works and work-in-progress. In 2018 and 2020 Second Movement has collaborated with the National Opera Studio to engage NOS students in the development and performance of new music. In 2019 Second Movement launched its programme Your Story, Your Voice, Your Stage which encourages participation in the development of new opera by non-professionals, and brings the opportunity to engage in opera to people whose access to it has been limited, and to disadvantaged or marginalised groups.
Its current Artistic Directors are Nicholas Chalmers, Oliver Mears and Simon Holdsworth.
“Small Wonder": In 2011, Second Movement was selected as one of the UK's seven leading small opera companies by Opera Now magazine.[1]
Rough for Opera
In 2010 Second Movement founded Rough for Opera[2] a regular programme of performances in which young and emerging opera creators road test and showcase new ideas and evolving work. The performances take place at the Cockpit Theatre, Gateforth Street, London, NW8 8EH.[3]
Rough Ideas Robert Thickness applauds an initiative that provides a platform for new works-in-progress while testing the idea for what opera can and should be for today’s creators and audiences, Opera Now March 2017
Rough for Opera on 24 March 2013 included Kate Whitley's Scars, based on a text by Stephanie Ndoungo, which was written as part of Freedom From Torture's creating writing group 'Write To Life'.[4]
Rough for opera composers: Kim B Ashton, Ed Baxter, Oded Ben-Tal, Michael Betteridge, Georgina Bowden, Santa Buss, Alexander Campkin, Timothy Cape, James Cave, Mike Christie, Anna Clock, Lloyd Coleman, Adam Dixon, Leo Geyer, Alex Groves, Edward Henderson, Jonathan Higgins, Alex Ho, Aaron Holloway-Nahum, Leo Hurley, Danyal Dhondy, Fraz Ireland, Catherine Kontz, Benjamin Lunn, Peter Longworth, William Marsey, David Merriman, Alex Mills, Michael-Jon Mizra, Helen Noir, Alex Paxton, Phil Poppy, Tom Randle, Ed Scoldng, Simone Spagnolo, Josh Spear, Amir Mahyar Tafreshipour, Benjamin Tassie, Martin Ward, Jenni Watson, Kate Whitley, Caroline Wilkins, Jonathan Woolgar.
Collaboration with the National Opera Studio
In 2018 Second Movement commenced a collaboration with the National Opera Studio to bring together each of the singers in the National Opera Studio’s current programme with a composers and a librettist, to develop and perform an aria on a theme chosen by, or of relevance to the singer. The first event was 12.20 in July 2018 in the Hoxton Hall. Composers included Philip Venables and Hannah Kendall. In 2020 the programme was conducted mostly online, with the singers and repetiteurs coming together in July to perform the arias, but without a live audience. A filmed recording of the performances and a film of the process of composition were launched in November 2020.[5]
Your Story, Your Voice, Your Stage
In 2019 Second Movement launched Your Story Your Voice Your Stage, a programme to support collaboration and involvement in opera composition and performance by participants new to opera who are not normally professional performers, working alongside professional composers and musicians. The launch took place at Rough for Opera in May 2019. The launch included a performance of Speak Red by composer Santa Buss and director FXXX BXXXXX , developed with people living with aphasia and speech therapists, some of whom took part in the performance, alongside cellist Heloise Werner.[6]
The Your Story Your Voice Your Stage programme has continued with the composition of an opera in collaboration with the charity Tourettes Action, under the leadership of composer Michael Betteridge.[7]
Productions
2012: Zátopek! by Emily Howard
Second Movement commissioned and performed Zátopek!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO8YkbZHDWE a 12-minute opera inspired by the life and times of legendary Czech long distance runner Emil Zátopek, as part of PRS for Music Foundation's New Music 20x12,[8] which supported the creation of 20 new pieces of music for the Cultural Olympiad. Zátopek! was created by composer Emily Howard [9] and librettist Selma Dimitrijevich – co-artistic director of the Grayscale Theatre Company,[10] and performed by Second Movement with Ensemble 10/10 in Liverpool and London in 2012.[11]
Director Danielle Urbas; singers John McManus, Peter Brathwaite, Wendy Dawn Thompson, Rosalind Coad, Toby Girling, Kris Belligh, Suzanne Dymott; Conductor Clark Rendell, Music director Nicholas Chalmers, Design Consultant Simon Holdsworth.
The world premiere of Zátopek! took place on 15 June 2012 at the Epstein Theatre, Liverpool, presented by Second Movement in partnership with Liverpool Philharmonic. The performance was broadcast on Hear and Now on BBC Radio 3 on 16 June and is available for download from NMC Recordings [12] The second performance took place at the Purcell Room, South Bank Centre London on 15 July 2012, as part of the New Music 20x12 Weekend Celebration[13] The composer of Zatopek Emily Howard describes how the opera was created in an interview with the PRS for New Music Foundation [14]
A review of the first performance in the Liverpool Echo.[15] was enthusiastic: “ Zatopek! …..is as unreservedly entertaining as the man it pays tribute to. That comes partly from the score, performed last night by Ensemble 10/10 relegated to the pit at the (N)Epstein, partly from the singers from opera company Second Movement, who built up a sweat performing in singlets and shorts Chariots of Fire style, and partly from the simple but effective visuals of the staging – ” The reviewer in The Guardian [16] commented: “Howard's score captures Zátopek's oddball personality by setting him at a slight harmonic variant with the rest of the field. Selma Dimitrijevic's libretto evokes a military chorus, a love duet with his javelin-throwing wife Dana (herself an Olympic champion) and a tipsy, beer-hall song of celebration; all in slightly less time than it took Zátopek to complete 12-and-a-half laps. Intelligent use of projection gives Danielle Urbas's production a sense of grainy newsreel footage. Ensemble 10/10 [17] present a meticulous rendering of the score's fluid, dream-like structure under Clark Rundell; and John McMunn's Zátopek shows an admirable ability to execute a punishing, high-lying tenor role while performing press-ups and jogging on the spot.”
Paul Morley reviewed the London performance on BBC 2’s The Review Show on 20 July 2012. He described it as “a tremendous performance” [18] Vanessa Feltz also discussed the work in The Express. [19] “Emily Howard’s extraordinary work – a re-creation in real time of the thrilling event” and prompted recollections of Zatopek in Vanessa Feltz’s programme on BBC radio London [20]
A film of Second Movement’s performance of Zatopek!, taken at the Purcell Room by NYLON films, on behalf of the PRS for Music Foundation, is available on The Space. The Space is the Arts Council/BBC digital Channel and Zatopek! is available to view alongside the other 19 pieces in New Music 20x12.[21]
In February 2011, The Medium by Gian Carlo Menotti, a Second Movement production first staged in 2006, was performed in a tour of Northern Ireland by NI Opera in association with Second Movement, with performances in the Strule Arts Centre, Omagh; The Great Hall, Downpatrick; Theatre at the Mill, Newtownabbey and The Market Place Theatre, Armagh. The production was directed by Oliver Mears with conductor Nicholas Chalmers and stage designer Simon Holdsworth. The cast were Yvette Bonner, David Butt Philip, Doreen Curran (in the title role of Madam Flora), Alison Dunne, Jane Harrington, and the actor Will Stokes.
The Knife's Tears by Bohuslav Martinů, a Second Movement production first staged in 2007, was performed by Second Movement at the Reduta, Brno and Divadlo DISK, Prague, in October 2010. The director was Oliver Mears, conductor Nicholas Chalmers, set designer Simon Holdsworth, and the cast were Yvette Bonner, Johnathan Brown and Hannah Pedley.
Czech television broadcast extracts from the performance and an interview with Oliver Mears and Nicholas Chalmers.[22]
The performance was discussed on Czech Radio in an interview with Ivan Kytka.[23]
The performance was part of a Triple Bill with two operas performed by the Ensemble Opera Diversa of Brno: Ela, Hela a Stop by Lukáš Sommer based on a text by Václav Havel, and Dýňový démon ve vegetariánské restauraci (The Pumpkin Demon in a Vegetarian Restaurant) by Ondřej Kyas, libretto by Pavel Drábek.[24]
Samuel Osmond Barber II was an American composer, pianist, conductor, baritone, and music educator, and one of the most celebrated composers of the mid-20th century. Principally influenced by nine years' composition studies with Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute and more than 25 years' study with his uncle, the composer Sidney Homer, Barber's music usually eschewed the experimental trends of musical modernism in favor of traditional 19th-century harmonic language and formal structure embracing lyricism and emotional expression. However, he adopted elements of modernism after 1940 in some of his compositions, such as an increased use of dissonance and chromaticism in the Cello Concerto (1945) and Medea's Dance of Vengeance (1955); and the use of tonal ambiguity and a narrow use of serialism in his Piano Sonata (1949), Prayers of Kierkegaard (1954), and Nocturne (1959).
The Crane School of Music is located in Potsdam, New York, and is one of three schools which make up the State University of New York (SUNY) at Potsdam.
Vanessa is an American opera in three acts by Samuel Barber, opus 32, with an original English libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti. It was composed in 1956–1957 and was first performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City on January 15, 1958 under the baton of Dimitri Mitropoulos in a production designed by Cecil Beaton and directed by Menotti. Barber revised the opera in 1964, reducing the four acts to the three-act version most commonly performed today.
Patricia Neway was an American operatic soprano and musical theatre actress who had an active international career during the mid-1940s through the 1970s. One of the few performers of her day to enjoy equal success on both the opera and musical theatre stages, she was a regular performer on both Broadway and at the New York City Opera during the 1950s and 1960s.
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Lee Henry Hoiby was an American composer and classical pianist. Best known as a composer of operas and songs, he was a disciple of composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Like Menotti, his works championed lyricism at a time when such compositions were deemed old fashioned. His most well known work is his setting of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke, which premiered at the St Paul Opera in 1971.
David Bruce is a British composer and a YouTuber.
Juliette is an opera by Bohuslav Martinů, who also wrote the libretto, in French, based on the play Juliette, ou La clé des songes by the French author Georges Neveux. A libretto in Czech was later prepared for its premiere which took place at the Prague National Theatre on 16 March 1938. Juliette has become widely considered as Martinů's masterpiece.
Beverly Wolff was an American mezzo-soprano who had an active career in concerts and operas from the early 1950s to the early 1980s. She performed a broad repertoire which encompassed operatic and concert works in many languages and from a variety of musical periods. She was a champion of new works, notably premiering compositions by Leonard Bernstein, Gian Carlo Menotti, Douglas Moore, and Ned Rorem among other American composers. She also performed in a number of rarely heard baroque operas by George Frideric Handel with the New York City Opera (NYCO), the Handel Society of New York, and at the Kennedy Center Handel Festivals.
The Last Savage is an opera in three acts by composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Menotti wrote his own libretto, originally in the Italian language. The opera was translated into French by Jean-Pierre Marty for the work's first (private) performance at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 21 October 1963, followed the next day by the public premiere. George Mead translated the work into English for the opera's American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera the following year.
Northern Ireland Opera is Northern Ireland's national opera company.
Andrew McKinley was an American operatic tenor, violinist, arts administrator, music educator, and school administrator. Although he mainly performed in the United States, he had an active international singing career with major opera companies and symphony orchestras from the 1940s through the 1960s. His repertoire spanned a wide range, from leading tenor parts to character roles.
James Maddalena is an American baritone who is chiefly associated with contemporary American opera. He gained international recognition in 1987 when he originated the role of Richard Nixon at the premiere of John Adams's opera Nixon in China at Houston. He has since reprised the role on many occasions, and recorded it for the Nonesuch Records release of the opera in 1987. In addition to Maddelena's role as Nixon, he has originated two other Adams characters: the Captain in The Death of Klinghoffer and Jack Hubbard in Doctor Atomic. He has also performed roles in the premieres of operas by Paul Moravec and Stewart Wallace among other American composers.
Emily Howard is a British composer whose work is best known for its inventive connections with mathematical shapes and processes.
Oliver Mears is an English opera director.
Nicholas Chalmers is an English conductor, and former artistic director of Nevill Holt Opera, a role he held from 2012 to 2023. Since 2023 he has been principal conductor of the National Youth Choir's 18-25 group, and an associate conductor of the BBC Singers.
Gian Carlo Menotti was an Italian-American composer, librettist, director, and playwright who is primarily known for his output of 25 operas. Although he often referred to himself as an American composer, he kept his Italian citizenship. One of the most frequently performed opera composers of the 20th century, his most successful works were written in the 1940s and 1950s. Highly influenced by Giacomo Puccini and Modest Mussorgsky, Menotti further developed the verismo tradition of opera in the post-World War II era. Rejecting atonality and the aesthetic of the Second Viennese School, Menotti's music is characterized by expressive lyricism which carefully sets language to natural rhythms in ways that highlight textual meaning and underscore dramatic intent.
Grace-Evangeline Mason is a British composer of contemporary classical music.
Larmes de couteau, H. 169, Knife tears, Czech Slzy nože, is a one-act opera by Bohuslav Martinů to a French libretto by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. Composed in Paris in March 1928, it was not premiered until October 1969 at the State Theatre, Brno. The plot contains surreal and grotesque elements, and the music demonstrates the composer's then preoccupation with jazz both in orchestration and musical language.
Divadlo za bránou is a 1936 stage work in three acts by Bohuslav Martinů with his own libretto; the first act is a ballet pantomime ; acts two and three are entitled opera buffa. The work is a mixture of theatrical styles: ballet and pantomime, opera buffa and folk dance and music from Czechoslovakia. He aimed to employ texts "once the vehicle of genuine folk theatre" to emphasize the theatrical principle rather than what he described as "a musical libretto" where music simply accompanies the nuances of the drama. The title refers to a place of entertainment outside the gates of a city, such as where a travelling troupe might perform.
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