Nicola Dempster, Press & PR Manager
nicola.dempster@operanorth.co.uk
0113 223 3526
Hannah Stockton, Press Officer
hannah.stockton@operanorth.co.uk
0113 223 3528
Opera North receives £500,000 award from Paul Hamlyn Foundation to expand audiences and reach parts of the community that are not currently attending live art performances.
Opera North’s Spring season has a festival feel and sees the Company presenting three very different works - all new productions - in three very different venues.
The Howard Assembly Room announces its new season, as the venue continues to celebrate the connections between music, film, words and performance. Among the award-winning international artists on the bill are jazz pianist Brad Mehldau (13 March), Tunisian singer Dhafer Youssef (30 March), and returning to the UK after a long hiatus, Canadian band The Be Good Tanyas (27 January).
A new opera for children and families, The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, by award-winning British-American composer David Bruce and librettist Glyn Maxwell, will receive its world premiere in the UK in 2013 ahead of touring dates throughout the UK and a two-week run in New York.
Today, Friday 7 December, saw Opera North launch of In Harmony Leeds, a new large-scale community development project using music.
In Harmony Leeds aims to help improve the social wellbeing and academic attainment of 350 children in full-time education and reach another 500 members of the wider community, through the skills gained in intensive, community-based music-making and high quality tuition. The project will be delivered at Windmill Primary School, in the Belle Isle area of South Leeds, from January 2013.
Opera North’s upcoming Winter season brings together four new productions exploring the extremes that people are driven to by the darker side of love.
Opera North’s Spring 13 season will see the Company once again do what it does best – discovering the best ways of producing new and exciting works which engage audiences of all ages and tastes.
Part of a current international renaissance in silent film, GW Pabst’s 1929 film Pandora’s Box, is screened with a new live score in four venues across the UK this autumn. Commissioned by Opera North Projects, Pandora’s Box will be performed in London, Manchester, Leeds and Warwick.
Riding on the wave of a tremendous year for Great Britain, next season Opera North will continue to fly the flag in a year of musical performances and programming that celebrates one of the greatest opera composers that ever lived, Benjamin Britten, including performances of four of his operas.
What price your soul? Opera North’s new season this September takes in a legendary but damned womaniser, a pact with the devil and one woman’s search for eternal life, in three new productions: Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Gounod’s Faust and Janáček’s The Makropulos Case.