Saturday 21 November 2015

Competition winners and a Gluck premiere - news from Bampton Classical Opera

Galina Averina, winner of Bampton Classical Opera's Young Singers Competition
Galina Averina
November 14, 2015 was the final of Bampton Classical Opera's Young Singers Competition, a biennial competition founded in 2013 to celebrate Bampton Classical Opera’s 20th birthday, and is aimed at identifying the finest emerging young opera singers currently working in the UK. 67 singers aged between 21 and 30 entered this year, and at the final the winner was Russian soprano Galina Averina (currently in her second year of Opera School at the Royal College of Music) and the runner-up Welsh soprano Céline Forrest (currently a young artist at the National Opera Studio). The adjudicators were tenor Bonaventura Bottone, and conductors Andrew Parrott and Peter Robinson, who is also a vocal coach at the Royal Academy of Music. Galina is awarded £1,500, and Céline £500.

Celine Forrest,runner up in Bampton Classical Opera's Young Singers Competition
Celine Forrest
Looking ahead to next year, Bampton Classical Opera will be performing a double bill of Gluck's Philemon et Baucis and Arne's The Judgement of Paris. Gluck's one-act mythological opera was written for the wedding celebrations of Ferdinand, Duke of Genoa and Archduchess Maria Amalia of Austria in 1769, some years after the premiere of Orfeo ed Euridice. Bampton's performance will be the work's first staging in modern times and the UK premiere of the work. It will be performed in a new English translation by Gilly French, in a performing edition based on the manuscript in the Royal College of Music.

The companion work is Arne's The Judgement of Paris, a short opera in the late Baroque style written in 1742. The text is by Congreve and was originally written for a famous competition in 1701 seeking new English operas. Both operas will be conducted by Paul Wingfield, designed and directed by Jeremy Gray with movement by Triona Adams.


Performances:
The Deanery Garden, Bampton, Oxfordshire: Friday, Saturday 22, 23 July 2016
The Orangery Theatre, Westonbirt School, Glos: Monday 29 August 2016
St John’s Smith Square, London: Tuesday 13 September 2016

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