Welsh National Youth Opera (WNYO) is made up of enthusiastic, talented young singers and instrumentalists between 14 and 25 years old.
The group meets regularly in Cardiff and works with experienced theatre professionals - directors, vocal coaches and musicians - to improve performance skills, as well as collaborating with composers and writers in the creation of totally new pieces.
Each year WNYO mounts a full-scale production - opera, musical theatre, devised pieces - in the Weston Studio of Wales Millennium Centre. In April 2005 it premièred the thrilling new opera The Tailor's Daughter composed by Brian Irvine with a libretto by Greg Cullen and directed by John Doyle. In July 2006 it performed Leonard Bernstein's comic operetta Candide to much acclaim ), while in July 2009 the company performed Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.
Commissioning new pieces, whose content is relevant and interesting to young performers and suitable for family audiences, is also central to WNYO's ethos.
Read more about Welsh National Youth Opera: See Also
Famous quotes containing the words welsh, national, youth and/or opera:
“Thy tongue
Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penned,
Sung by a fair queen in a summers bower,
With ravishing division, to her lute.”
—William Shakespeare (15641616)
“I would dodge, not lie, in the national interest.”
—Larry Speakes (b. 1939)
“Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poets job. The rest is literature.”
—Jean Cocteau (18891963)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)