Eight of the 15 performances are being filmed in the theatre without an audience and with artists and technicians safely apart. Others are streamed from artists' own homes.
The Found Season features more than 70 f the world’s leading singers and musicians – whose normally busy diaries are unexpectedly clear. Launched at a time when Grange Park Opera season should have been opening, the programme reflects our curious times, with profound and uplifting responses in music to aspects of the human condition – reflection, anguish and joy.
Baritone Roderick Williams performs on stage at Grange Park Opera. Photo: Richard Lewisohn
Among the artists are the baritone Roderick Williams, who takes to the stage at Grange Park to perform Schumann’s reflective song cycle Liederkreis. Away from the Surrey opera house, singing stars Sir Bryn Terfel and Sir Simon Keenlyside give concerts from their homes in Wales, and tenor Joseph Calleja sings from his native Malta.
Back at Grange Park, two needy women pour out their anguished hearts. In Francis Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine soprano Claire Booth lets rip on the telephone. And in Dominick Argento’s 1981 work, Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night, the jilted bride from Dickens's Great Expectations goes over the disastrous day that changes her life.
London-based, Russian-born piano virtuoso Pavel Kolesnikov plays Chopin and Beethoven on a magnificent C Bechstein concert grand.
For fans of Wagner, Iain Burnside’s music theatre piece The View from the Villa illuminates the interwoven lives of four extraordinary people (the Wagners and the Wesendoncks) with the words and music they inspired. Music includes Wesendonck Lieder and extracts from Die Walküre and Tristan und Isolde
Coco Tomita, string finalist in the BBC Young Musician of the Year 2020, is to play with fellow music students
Tamara Rojo, artistic director of English National Ballet, introduces a pas de deux from lead principal Erina Takahashi and first soloist James Streeter on the Grange Park Opera stage, followed by an interview set in the idyllic gardens surrounding the Theatre in the Woods.
The supremely gifted violinist and newly announced winner of the string section of BBC Young Musician of the Year, Coco Tomita, will appear alongside her fellow locked-down colleagues from the Yehudi Menuhin School.
The climax of The Found Season is Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen, composed during the closing months of the Second World War. Strauss took up his pen the day after the Vienna opera was destroyed and his music mourns the loss of culture. Each of the 23 string players from London Symphony Orchestra, English National Opera and the London Philharmonic Orchestra will have more than five square metres of space on Grange Park Opera’s large stage.
Pianist Pavel Kolesnikov plays Beethoven
So, after the reflection and anguish, joy triumphs. Live music-making is back, and with houses all over Europe finding ways to stage concerts again, ever-resourceful Grange Park is in the vanguard of the future of live music-making in Britain.
The Found Season can be viewed free, but donations are invited.Click here for more details
| What | The Found Season: Grange Park Opera online |
| Where | Online | MAP |
| When |
04 Jun 20 – 22 Jul 20, 15 performances, streamed at intervals from 4 June, and then on demand until 22 July |
| Price | £Donations |
| Website | Click here for more information |