Different League!

The Henley wedding went really well last Saturday, we had been asked to provide some singers to help create a unique and atmospheric event. We got in touch with our old mates, the Ashby sisters who along with several of their colleagues from stile antico produced some fantastic sounds. The bride and her mother were delighted... and it was a truly wonderful and uplifting occasion.
Our non executive directors met again last night, we discussed charitable status once again and it seems we are moving gradually to the point of making an application, once we have consulted with a charity expert. I'm personally convinced its the way to go, even in these difficult economic times, the arts are as important as ever, and we so want to develop our company and its reach into communities...
We're now getting ready for our 'singing waiters' gig at the weekend and also we've got to run some more Menotti rehearsals, in time for our upcoming performances. The cornerstone at Didcot has also just called us, to discuss a potential Christmas production.. so its all happening!

Dave does it for charity!

Dave, our dynamic and extraordinarily fit (for his age) director did an amazing 146 sponsored bike ride to Argentan, Abingdon’s twin town in France

helping to raise much needed funds for Pathways Workshop. Dave is our director responsible for our friends scheme, so look out friends, he might be recruiting you for his next challenge!

June continues to be busy for Opera Anywhere with a wedding coming up soon, a singing waiters and waitresses job coming up and preparations for our upcoming Menotti performances plus the punt and boat trips. With all this going we've decided to stagger our new house move throughout July... would kill us to try and get in by the end of June..

All go for Menotti!

Its crazy in the Opera Anywhere office at the moment! Moving house within the next few weeks and lots going on! Emma Noakes, a wonderful soprano we discovered last year is singing for us in a La Dolce Vita cruise tonight (lets hope the weather gets warmer!). Vanessa and myself are performing a song concert tomorrow at Barford St Michael and we have another Menotti performance coming up in Sunningwell on July 11th. We've also been asked to perform the Menotti at the new Bath Opera Festival later in July and on top of that we're in the midst of planning opera evening classes in the Autumn. In addition, just been asked to put together a group of singers for a wedding in Henley later this month (we've managed to secure a sub-set of the wonderful stile antico ). We've also been preparing to set Opera Anywhere up as a charity and that's taking up so much time too and we really must get Nokia to sponsor our Menotti 'The Telephone' production. Never dull here...

Success at the Cheltenham Festival!

Just returned from the Cheltenham festival singing competitions, at their marvelous town hall and brought home a couple of cups (much to Vanessa's displeasure - she hates cleaning silver and really frowns on me being involved in competitions!). However, for me its a great way of driving me on to learn more repertoire and a brilliant way to assess one's own progress along the long road of developing singing technique and performance skills. I'm delighted to report a marked improvement on previous years efforts and won the Folk Song Class (for the 'Helene Cass Memorial Challenge Cup') and also the Gloucestershire composer's song class (The Herbert Howells Memorial Cup) for my performance of Ivor Gurney's 'By A Bierside'. I was really disappointed by losing out to a young guy for the Tenor cup though, although the Finzi songs I chose were very demanding for singer and accompanist alike!
Anyway, back to more mundane stuff now as we prepare to start moving the Opera Anywhere office this week and I must get on with finalising our future Menotti tour...

Exciting times!

Exciting times ahead! In the next few weeks we will be ready to move into a new home and a new office! We're busy now making sure the infrastructure can support our next few years of growth, sorting out a new phone system, new IT hardware and software and we have just commissioned a brand new web site, from our very good friends at Commun Design. The new site should be up and running within the next couple of months, as will our new office. Our new facilities have enabled us organise our massive collection of props and staging more efficiently and provide more office and storage space.

We've just returned from our quarterly non exec directors meeting where we have been sharing our ambitions to develop an educational division to Opera Anywhere, hopefully to provide singing, acting and performance masterclasses to folks living in Oxfordshire. We're thinking along the lines of evening classes and the odd weekend session, probably 10 week terms starting in the Autumn, however, alot to be done before then, we need to persuade our non exec directors to be trustees of a new charity organisation we need to set up. On looking at all the opera companies around, they all seem to be charities and benefiting greatly from grants and donations, something we have been considering for some time now but have been concerned about the bureaucracy involved, however probably no alternative if we are to grow and thrive. Still waiting for Lord Farringdon at Buscot Park to come back with confirming dates for a couple of performances of the Menotti in June, as soon as we have dates I'll post them on the site.

Good news re our 'La Dolce Vita' opera cruises - already got a nice corporate booking for a half a dozen singers for a mass punting expedition in July. Currently very busy preparing for the Cheltenham Festival, a competitive singing competition middle of may, would love to come home with the Tenor cup! Also a concert on the 10th May, Victorian & Edwardian song.. (hence the image shown here) should be great fun.

Performance spooked!

Just recovering from last night's appearance at the Unicorn theatre in Abingdon, 'The Telephone' went as brilliantly as ever and 'The Medium' was going so well, until.... something really spooky occurred, something that never has happened to any of us before - but mysteriously freaked out our brilliant accompanist Linda, between the rehearsal and the performance 23 pages of music went 'missing'. The action on stage changed so much I didn't recognise it! Is there a ghost at the Unicorn that wanted to prevent us telling the real story that Madame Flora was a con merchant? The whole second seance was missed and vital truths about Madame Flora was illiminated from the story.!
Had I thought more quicker I would have got John (on lights) to dim them and have a pause in the action to allow for the performers to reset themselves. However, freaked out by what seemed to be happening before my eyes, I felt completely unprepared and the result was a premature, stunted and bloodless ending with the shooting of Toby . A real shame as Iain had rehearsed an amazing fall down the stairs and I noticed he had a double dose of blood ready to place in his mouth to ensure the most bloody and dramatic of deaths! Vanessa was mortified, Linda and the cast too. The ghost of the unicorn seemed to lurk over the atmosphere as the entire cast, following the show, resorted to dining out at our sponsors for the evening, 'Ask', an amazing new Italian restaurant in Abingdon. Some of the cast turned to copious amounts of drink to drown their sorrows, or maybe just as a relief that it was all over!
On the positive side we did make a brilliant discovery and could be an answer to my stage management problem, we 'employed' 2 young men, brothers in their teens, Daniel and William Hall of Bayworth. They made our lives so much easier with their incredible efficiency, good sense of humour and sheer hard work! When we eventually got home in the early hours of the morning we found that the Medium's spell was still over us, our boiler had packed up and no hot water to soak away our wounds!

Fab review in Oxford Times

We've just had a fab review for our Menotti published in the Oxford Times, Nicola Lisle came to see our first performance last weekend and obviously really enjoyed it and rated it highly. Comments like "Opera Anywhere has already established an enviable reputation for small-scale opera; with this double bill, they have set themselves a new benchmark in excellence" will do us a power of good, not least underlining the fact that we can produce good quality small scale opera ourselves without having to buy expensive directors in who I invariably end up having disagreements with. The success of the show is down to some great individual performances from each member of the cast, not only their singing and acting, but the way they have gelled together as a team and prepared to work under pressure and use their creative minds to develop what happens on stage. They have all worked so hard for this and I am delighted that the review rewards them all.... and long may this production tour and tour, it has many miles in it!
ps what a lucky chap 'Toby' is? Apart from getting shot that is!