Greetings! 🎼
Wherever you are on your operatic odyssey, we are here to guide you...
Perhaps you are already a lover of opera, or perhaps only an opera-curious individual. But wherever you are on your operatic odyssey, we are here to guide you. And who are we, you ask? 🎶
We are the 2024 cohort of MA Opera Making and Writing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London - a group of six composers and librettists whose aims are to tell new, relevant stories through the medium of opera.
Since 2023, we have been learning the ins and outs of opera with Toby Young, Stephen Plaice, and Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh. We have spent months of preparation alchemising text and music, rephrasing and orchestrating in order to create three chamber operas, with the goals of demonstrating the radical human experiences of opera, while also pushing the boundaries of the medium.
We are a group of creatives hailing from the UK, USA, and Germany, with creative backgrounds ranging from contemporary composition, to opera singers, to playwrights, and singer-songwriters. This page will serve to document the process of creating these operas, showcase our individual and collaborative practices as composer-librettist pairs, and our experiences as opera writers and makers in the 21st Century.
Our operas will be staged at Milton Court Studio Theatre, London, performed by singers from the Guildhall Opera Department, conducted by Dominic Wheeler and directed by Ashley Dean. We are so excited to show you the fruits of our labour.
Come and join us. You won’t be disappointed…
With love,
The Opera Makers 🎶
Alexia Peniguel, Sara Clifford, Hannah Hayden, Zygmund de Somogyi, William Gardner, Evan L. Snyder