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Birmingham Opera Company has been on the go since 1987 finding ways of sharing a passion for opera with new audiences. With Graham Vick at the helm since the outset, the company has won many awards for its hugely inventive and accessible work. As City of Birmingham Touring Opera it blazed a trail across the UK performing flexible smaller productions with special arrangements by composer, Jonathan Dove, for an orchestra of fifteen players. Performing in leisure centres, sports halls and town halls some of the great works of the operatic repertoire were made available to people with little or no access to live opera performances. La Boheme, Cinderella, The Magic Flute, Falstaff, Macbeth and, of course, the legendary 2 night version of Wagner’s four part Ring Saga won the company many friends and the Prudential Award. And we added to the repertoire with new commissions from the legendary Ravi Shankar (Ghanahsyam) and Howard Goodall (Silas Marner). In 2000 the company changed direction and shortened the name to Birmingham Opera Company. Now the focus would be on bringing local people into the life of the company and to share the making of a professional production. Working in strange places certainly not associated with performances – a Big Top next door to Villa Park, a burnt out old ice rink, an old marble-clad banking hall and an abandoned car parts factory - we can share our experience, our passion and our skills with a broad range of people from a city renowned for its diversity and youth. This is opera as an unlikely tool to support social inclusion. Our productions provide a platform for people from very different backgrounds, faiths, ages, education and cultures to explore what are universal stories of human experience. Working in our ensemble we are able to explore these stories and issues as they affect us today and at the same time introduce people to an important strand of Western European cultural heritage. This collaboration with our colleagues at Arena di Verona is a first. Thanks to their generosity and shared vision for opera we have been able to transfer a large-scale production from a 17,000 seat Roman amphitheatre to our own National Indoor Arena. This will also be the first time that Birmingham Opera Company and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra have worked together – indeed it is a first for the orchestra who have not played for a fully-staged opera production before. Such a production would normally be beyond the means of a small company like Birmingham Opera Company but thanks to the visionary leadership in Verona and our own sense of adventure we are able to bring this extraordinary production here to our home city. For Birmingham Opera Company
Big Thank Yous to |
