A JOINT celebratory concert featuring a double bill of English operas that premiered nearly 300 years apart will keep followers of classical music entertained in both Teignmouth and Chudleigh next weekend.
Regina, Triumph and Tragedy is an exciting collaboration of two South Devon musical companies, Red Earth Opera and South Devon Singers, who have decided to hold a joint celebration of the anniversaries of their founding.
The joint concert will feature two works, each approximately an hour long, at the heart of which are two formidable queens, Dido and Elizabeth the First, which display the strength and the vulnerability of these two women.
Red Earth Opera is a highly respected operatic group which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. In that time, it has grown from a small group of keen musicians to an extremely popular and very competent company.
Its aim is to showcase young professional soloists who are backed by a vibrant chorus and extremely competent orchestra, whilst allowing audiences to hear music of a very high quality at affordable prices.
They have produced several full operas as well as concerts featuring popular operatic excerpts, nearly always in English. This is under the baton of their founder and musical director, South Devon’s Jane Anderson-Brown.
Red Earth Opera ‘s performance will be Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, which tells the story of Dido, the legendary Queen of Carthage and her doomed love affair with the Trojan hero, Aeneas.
The other half of this special anniversary concert will be featuring the South Devon Singers, founded twenty years ago by Teignmouth’s own David Haines.
Like Jane, David is a skilled musician and teacher, and his contribution to this concert will be his own composition, Armadadrama. This is a musical drama which retells in song the events of 1588 when the English navy’s victory over Spain marked the beginning of her naval supremacy.
South Devon Singers are well known both locally and much further afield, having performed in both Devon and Cornwall, as well as in London. Their range of venues is varied - from pubs to concert halls, from residential homes to garden fairs - and everywhere in-between.
Principal soloists are the very popular Ceri Davies and Grace Lovelass, who have both sung with Red Earth Opera before. They recently sang in a concert of operatic favourites this Spring, and prior to that in a thrilling production in English of Bellini’s “The Capulets and the Montagues,” both of which played to packed audiences.
The Teignmouth concert takes place at Pavilions Teignmouth on Saturday, June 8 at 7pm. Tickets are available from [email protected] .
The Chudleigh performance is at 7pm in the town’s Parish Church on June 9 . Tickets for this can be obtained through ticketsource.co.uk/southdevonsingers.