Opera North moves into the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, from Tuesday to Saturday for a mini-residency of concerts on the theme of storytelling.
The five-day programme in the Courtyard Theatre combines live opera with children's theatre, film, animation and photography, beginning on Tuesday with 10am and 1pm screenings of the new animated film version of Prokofiev's Peter And The Wolf, accompanied live by the Orchestra of Opera North.
The film, produced by BreakThru Films, was made using stop-frame model animation pioneered by Wallace and Gromit creators Aardman Animations. Director Suzie Templeton has created her Peter And The Wolf expressly to be shown with a live orchestra performing in front of the screen.
Further screenings follow at 1pm and 6.30pm on Thursday.
Wednesday's concert, Mercy And Grand: The Tom Waits Programme was conceived specially for the residency. At 7.45pm, an ensemble of six musicians and two of Opera North's most versatile singers bring together American folk, the music of Kurt Weill and ten songs by Tom Waits.
Led by violinist Joe Townsend, Opera North head of music James Holmes and long-time Waits collaborator Gavin Bryars, the performance moves from songs of the lost innocence of childhood to accounts of terrifying train rides and finds a context for Waits's songwriting within earlier music from Europe and North America.
Townsend, a gipsy music specialist, has created next Friday's 7.45pm performance, Foaie Verde (Green Leaf), with photo-journalist Dominick Tyler. Romanian singer Dana Codorean-Berciu and a small orchestra will be performing 12 songs inspired by Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle.
The music paints a picture from one dawn to the next, while Tyler and Townsend use projected photography and recordings from their travels to Romanian gipsy villages to document the harshness and beauty of peasant life in Transylvania.
For next Saturday's chamber concert of Astor Piazzolla's Tango Apasionado at 7.45pm, Opera North will be joined by classical tango exponents, including bandoneon player Kristina Kuusisto.
David Greed, violin, James Woodrow, guitar, James Holmes, piano, and Claire Sadler, bass, play songs from Piazzolla's only opera, Maria de Buenos Aires, his masterpiece, the Concerto del Angel, and his setting of a series of poems by Borges about knife-fights in downtown Buenos Aires. Film projections and lighting complement "music filled with rage".
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