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Members of the University College Opera taking part in rehearsals ahead of their All Hallow’s performance on Friday night |
Students in premiere league
PREVIEW: GERMAN REQUIEM/TRISTAN AND ISOLDE
Gospel Oak Church
UCL Union Music Society will perform Brahms’s deeply spiritual German Requiem and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (Prelude and Liebestodt) at All Hallow’s Gospel Oak Church in Savernake Road tomorrow (Friday).
The concert, which features UCL soloist Andrew Davies, is to raise funds for the University College Opera (UCO) company.
The Music Society is one of the oldest and largest at UCL, and aims to bring classical music to as large an audience as possible. A semi-professional company, its performances of important operatic staples and premieres provide students with a unique opportunity to perform exciting, challenging pieces with professional singers and directors.
Since UCL has no designated music department, the commitment and quality of musicianship among the students involved in UCO is all the more remarkable.
And although the director of music, Charles Peebles, selects the producer, singers and repertoire, the whole administration of UCO is undertaken entirely by students.
The members of the orchestra and chorus are all students pursuing non-music degrees, but the energy with which they participate is testimony to a truly unique enterprise.
The students’ musical prowess will be tested to the full with Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, a landmark development of Western composition that demands a remarkable range of orchestral harmony and choral colour to tease out the full power of this dramatic work.
The company has in the past proved itself to be a prestigious springboard for young talent, with many singers, such as Dame Felicity Lott, Robert Lloyd and Jonathan Summers, going on to become international stars.
Since its formation in 1951, UCO has successfully brought many rarely performed operas back into the public eye, and caused many neglected works to be re-evaluated.
Several operas now firmly re-established in the standard operatic repertoire featured in UCO’s early days.
To date the company proudly claims 16 British premieres and three world premieres. This will continue next March, with the British premiere of Fiesque by Edouard Lalo.
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