Twenty years in the past, Blackheath Halls launched an formidable annual neighborhood opera undertaking with a manufacturing of Bizet’s Carmen. This September, the undertaking returns to the opera that began all of it, celebrating 20 years of creativity, collaboration and neighborhood.
The corporate has by no means been one to shrink back from a problem. Final 12 months they introduced Gluck’s not often staged Iphigenia in Tauris [see my review] and different works have included Bernstein’s Candide [see my review], Blow’s Venus and Adonis [see my review], Mozart’s Idomeneo, and Weber’s Der Freischütz (The Magic Bullets).
For the twentieth anniversary manufacturing, Carmen can be directed by Harry Fehr and carried out by Christopher Stark [the team responsible for Blackheath’s production of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana in 2024, see my review] with performances from 20 to 27 September 2026. Mezzo-soprano Katie Bray will make her function debut as Carmen with Oliver Johnston as Don Jose [he sang Turiddu in Blackheath’s Cavalleria Rusticana], Chuma Sijeqa as Escamillo and Meeta Raval as Micaela. The manufacturing brings collectively skilled opera singers, Trinity Laban vocal college students, neighborhood orchestra and a neighborhood refrain of native performers aged 8 to 80+, together with college students from associate faculty Charlton Park Academy, a Particular Academy for college kids with complicated particular academic wants.
Blackheath Halls Neighborhood Opera has welcomed 1000’s of individuals from throughout south-east London since 2007, creating a rare intergenerational neighborhood introduced collectively via opera. A number of members of this 12 months’s neighborhood refrain and orchestra additionally carried out within the very first manufacturing of Carmen, and they’re returning to the stage alongside first-time individuals.
Tom Butler, who’s performing Morales, sang within the Blackheath Halls Opera refrain as a toddler, and he’s at present finding out on the Royal Academy Opera Faculty on the Royal Academy of Music. He feedback:
“Blackheath Halls is just about the complete motive that I’ve gone into opera – I sang in a number of productions as a part of the kids’s refrain, and as certainly one of Noah’s Sons in Britten’s ‘Noye’s Fludde’, then once more within the refrain as an adolescent for Weber’s ‘The Magic Bullets’.
My brother additionally sang within the youngsters’s refrain earlier than me and my Dad now sings within the refrain yearly, so it’s a giant a part of my life, and I’ve gone to see the opera yearly! It’s thrilling to have the ability to return as a principal, and I’m honoured to be concerned once more.”
Full particulars from Blackheath Halls’ web site.
