Leonard Bernstein, Trouble in Tahiti

Conductor: Jamie Andrews
Director: Michael Burden

Ante-chapel, New College
8.30pm
2 & 3 March 2023
£15/£7 concessions from https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/

Cast

Sam – Jake Sternberg
Dinah – Melissa Talbot
Trio – Ellie Stamp, Edward Beswick, Ben Gilchrist

Leonard Bernstein’s short opera, Trouble in Tahiti, comes between two bigger works, his 1944 On the Town and Candide of 1956. Described as ‘a candid portrait of the troubled marriage of a young suburban couple’, it tells the story of Sam and Dinah, who are trapped in a suburban, middle-class, consumerist world, desiring love and intimacy, but achieving only marital discord.

The title is from an escapist movie, ‘Trouble in Tahiti’, which Dinah goes to see during the afternoon; in the evening, when they fail to address their marital difficulties, the only solution is to go to cinema – where they see ‘Trouble in Tahiti’. The couple are backed by a static trio, fulfilling the role of a Greek chorus and the score, which draws on songs, jazz rhythms and other popular idioms, is dedicated to Marc Blitzstein.

Pergolesi, Stabat Mater; Vivaldi, Nisi Dominus
Conductor: Luke Mitchell
4 March 2023

Ante-chapel, New College
8.30pm
4 March 2023
£12/£5 concessions from https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/

Soloists
Maryam Wocial – soprano
Austin Haynes – countertenor

Pergolei’s Stabat Mater of 1736 is one of the best-known 18th-century sacred works. Written by Pergolesi for the Confraternita dei Cavalieri di San Luigi di Palazzo and was one of his last works; he is said to have died just after completing the composition. The work gained considerable attention almost immediately and it circulated widely in printed editions. The Nisi Dominus is a setting of the Latin text of Psalm 127, the title coming from the first two words of psalm text. It was written in the early 1700s for the Ospedale della Pietà, suggesting that although it has been much recorded by with both women and men as soloists, a female voice was probably Vivaldi’s original intention. The score has been described as having the ‘greatest poise and delicacy’.

Johann Pepusch
The Death of Dido
27 & 28 January 2023

Conductor: Luke Mitchell
Director: Michael Burden

27 & 28 January 2023
8.30 pm
Ante-Chapel, New College

Click here to book

Cast
Dido – Maryam Wocial
Aeneas – Austin Haynes
Cupid – Ischia Gooda
Mercury – Matthew Pope

Aeneas loves Dido but abandons her to fate …
The Death of Dido is one of a group of masques written in and around 1715; it has music by Johann Pepusch, a German composer who had arrived in England in 1704. Booth’s libretto uses the same part of Virgil’s story used by Tate for Purcell’s more famous opera, Dido and Aeneas; Aeneas, searching for a new Rome, called at Carthage and the gods intervene to drive him off, and Dido thrown into despair, dies.