Productions and Performers
From these first successes, the Festival has made a significant impact on the operatic culture of Britain with new productions of rarely-performed operas (such as Britten's Let's Make an Opera (1980); Domenico Cimarosa's Il matrimonio segreto (1981 & 1993); Kodály's Háry János (in its British stage premiere in 1982); Vivaldi's Griselda (1983, but not seen anywhere since its original Venice presentation in 1735); Cherubini's Médée (1984, in its original French dialogue never seen in Britain); and, from 1986, many productions of Handel's operas, as well as many others by Cimarosa (in 1989 it presented three).
Performers of the quality of Thomas Allen, Rosalind Plowright, Jean Rigby, Alan Opie, Nigel Kennedy, Cleo Laine, John Ogdon, Alan Bates, Dame Janet Baker, Victoria de los Ángeles,Dame Margaret Price and Sarah Brightman. The current resident orchestra at the festival (as of 2008) is the Northern Chamber Orchestra.
Since 2002, the Festival has presented five or six operas each summer. In 2006 it presented eight operas ranging from Mozart's early Apollo and Hyacinth to Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose, but including works by Telemann, Monteverdi, Gluck, Britten and Bizet.
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Famous quotes containing the words productions and/or performers:
“It is well known, that the best productions of the best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University of God after death.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“... we performers are monsters. We are a totally different, far-out race of people. I totally and completely admit, with no qualms at all, my egomania, my selfishness, coupled with a really magnificent voice.”
—Leontyne Price (b. 1927)