New Chamber Opera is a professional opera company located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It specializes in the fields of chamber opera and music theatre, and produces rarely performed works from the Baroque era to the present. It is a member of the Opera and Music Theatre Forum. New Chamber Opera has received financial support from the Arts Council of Great Britain and The National Lottery.
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History
New Chamber Opera was founded in 1990 by Michael Burden and Gary Cooper. Burden serves as its director. The Company has staged more than thirty productions, including Handel’s Orlando, Serse and Amadigi di Gaula, Cimarosa’s The Secret Marriage and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Il Rè pastore. The company has an associated Baroque orchestra, The Band of Instruments.
New Chamber Opera has produced recordings of Charpentier’s stage music and a collected edition of Rameau’s cantatas for ASV; other discs include Purcell’s Gresham Autograph and Music for Ceremonial Oxford. Appearances outside Oxford have included concerts and productions at the Tudeley and Southwark Festivals, several performances at London’s South Bank Centre, and at the National Gallery. With its contemporary music ensemble Phoenix, it has performed several pieces of twentieth-century music theatre including Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King, Vessalii Icones, Notre Dames des Fleurs, and Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot, and Harrison Birtwistle’s Down by the Greenwood Side.
New Chamber Opera has frequently recovered and performed lesser known works, particularly those of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. To this end its members have prepared new editions and commissioned new translations. In 2008 and 2009, New Chamber Opera took part in a national fundraising campaign led by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, to prevent the only known manuscript of the English version of Francesco Cavalli's opera, Erismena, from being exported to the United States. New Chamber Opera subsequently staged the opera using a new edition by Michael Burden, and toured the production to the Opera at West Green House.
In 2016 the company performed "Rothschild's Violin" in the antechapel of Oxford's New College. Its music director is Steven Devine, and its singing patron is James Bowman.
Activities
The focus of the Company's professional activities is the Summer Opera, an annual garden staging in the Warden's Garden at New College. The garden, a natural theatrical space surrounded by stone walls with an 18th-century stone summer house, is located between Queen's Lane and All Souls College.
The Band of Instruments, founded by Michael Burden and Gary Cooper in 1995, first performed with the Choir of New College, Oxford. In 2014 the Band's musical director is Roger Hamilton, and its leader is Caroline Balding.
The Company operates the New Chamber Opera Studio, which stages two student productions annually and a recital series of twenty-four concerts in which they take part. Recent productions have included Orpheus in the Underworld, by Offenbach, in 2012 and La Calisto, by Francesco Cavalli, in 2014 New Chamber Opera also funds two Repetiteur Scholarships every three years to St Catherine's College, Oxford.
New Chamber Opera's recordings have mostly appeared on the Gaudeamus label, with Academy Sound and Vision. These include the first recordings of music by Purcell from the Gresham Manuscript. It has frequently recorded French Baroque music, recording stage music from Charpentier's output, an the only complete recording of Rameau's cantatas.
Productions
This list of productions follows the information in the company's website.