Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival returns later this month with its visionary festival of new opera, with events from 24 August to 29 September 2024, a month of essential listening. The festival opens with Will Gardner and Matthew Green’s second opera The Prisoner (a work which won the Stephen Oliver Award) at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre. The remainder of the festival is at The Cockpit Theatre, Marylebone with the exception of Catherine Kontz’ 12 Hours at Kings College, London, which will be a 6-hour extract of a marathon 12-hour performance for voice and electronics.
Performers include eight returning artists and 17 teams who are joining the festival for the first time. Returning alumni include composer Will Gardner (with The Prisoner), mezzo-soprano Rosie Middleton (who performs in Catherine Kontz’s 12 Hours and Elif Karlidag and Sam Redway’s The Game), and composer Edward Lambert who presents a double bill The Parting / Buster’s Trip based on the texts of Federico García Lorca.
Other highlights include Guy Harries’ QueerLove, a celebration of LGBTQ+ relationships through the medium of the love letter, Frank Horvat and Stacie Dunlop’s Letters, a solo performance exploring a difficult relationship with a troubled parent, Josh Kaye, Hestor Dart, and Amy Kearsley’s You Can’t Kill the Spirit, based on the testimonials of female activists of the 1960s and inspired by the 1982 human chain around Greenham Common, and Madeleine Brooks’ I Shot Mussolini, a true story led by the direct descendant of Violet Gibson, who very nearly single-handedly changed the course of the twentieth century.
Visiting productions from overseas include Vicky Nizri and Cristina Pardo’s A Life of One’s Own, an opera from Mexico about the story of a young woman migrating to build a life for herself, featuring Sephardic music, porte renaud’s Andrias Scheuchzeri, an ecological science-fiction project from France, Margarida Gonçalves’ The Acts of Brízida Vaz, inspired by renowned Portuguese poet and playwright Gil Vicente and rooted in Portuguese tradition and Gaia Aloisi and Fabrizio Funari’s Aqua Tofana, an Italy-UK co-production centred on 17th Century apothecarist Giulia Tofana’s lethal liquid invention.
Rendevous with Revenge features a triple bill, originally written as part of the Royal Academy of Music Opera Makers project, with music and words by Sarah Marze, Yan Ee Toh, Adam Zolty, Ade Bademosi, Noah McCreadie, and Philippa Lawford.
Full details from the festival website.
