Fantasy & Fairytales, a return of the Opera Festival & The Rain Show: a busy year for Tête à Tête

Launched in 2007, Tête à Tête will be 30 next year! But this year the company shows no sign of slacking. From 3 to 6 July the latest chapter in their longstanding partnership with the Royal College of Music features five new short operas. Fantasy & Fairytales features new work created for young audiences; each opera opens out a different fantastical world, drawing on folklore and storytelling to explore human experience. The creative team includes director Bill Bankes-Jones (artistic director of Tête à Tête), conductor Michael Rosewell and designer Sarah Jane Booth.

Fantasy & Fairytales includes Daniel Musashi’s Ogga Loggas, in which ancient forests and age-old curses teach us the importance of looking after our world, and Lasha Kharkhelauri’s Ramona, a Georgian tale of love and upheaval set inside a puppet theatre as well as Asher Joyce’s Three Lives, Deniz Dortok’s The Boy Who Went to Find Fear and Ruvin Meda’s The Nightingale and the Rose.

Further details from the RCM website. 

And from 8 to 20 September, the company’s flagship Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival returns to the Cockpit Theatre, Marylebone for new operas that include a quadruple bill of young composers. There are operas on the last eight days of Mary Queen of Scots, Frankenstein, and a Cornish-language setting of Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott. There is an international collaboration spanning Finland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Germany, opera from a Ukrainian composer, a Hong Kong artist, an opera exploring relationships between people and their languages, incorporating Cantonese 

Further details from the Tête à Tête website.

And just to show that the company spreads its wings wider than London, last month (20 to 25 April) they presented The Rain Show in Tyneside and Cornwall.  The Rain Show was a collaboration between British and Kenyan artists bringing workshops and performance into schools across North Tyneside and Cornwall. Delivered in partnership with Across Arts (led by producer Helene Mathiesen), and Baraka Opera Kenya, the project introduced young people to opera through cross-cultural exchange and culminated in a public performance on 25 April. The creative team featured librettist Nami Shah and composer Shaka Lwaki.

Further details from the Tête à Tête website.