Win Tickets To Summer Opera In Chiswick House

See Focus Opera make debut performance next month

Would you like to win tickets to the annual Summer Opera staged in the gardens of Chiswick House in July? This year the Opera promises an enhanced experience with a bigger stage and brand-new sound system.

The London-based Focus Opera company will perform a unique evening of arias and favourites from musical theatre in Behind the Aria on Wednesday, July 3, while on the second evening, Thursday 4th July, the company will perform a powerful new production of Bizet’s Carmen set just outside Seville in the 1950s.

Focus Opera’s award-winning Artistic Director Keith Cheetham, has created Behind the Aria exclusively for the performance at Chiswick House.  It follows a young singer as she attends an audition which turns out to be a lot stranger than she expects.  The Focus Opera Chamber Orchestra will perform favourites from grand Opera and Operetta; Verdi, Puccini, Mozart, Bizet, Lehar. The show will also include gems from the world of Musical Theatre; Gershwin, Bernstein, Sondheim and Schönberg.

Carmen will be performed by Focus Opera’s young international cast who promise a thrilling night of drama, sung in English and enhanced by Georges Bizet’s exciting and beautiful melodies. The composer’s rich and timeless score contains some of opera’s finest arias, acclaimed for the brilliance of melody, harmony, atmosphere and orchestration, and for the skill with which Bizet represented, musically, the emotions and suffering of his characters.

Tickets for all performances cost £30 for adults and £15 for under 16s (includes p&p and no booking fee), and are available now from www.chfriends.co.uk  Performances will be staged on the magnificent lawns at the rear of Chiswick House.  Gates will open at 6pm allowing time for picnics on the lawns before the shows that start at 7.30pm each evening.  The audience is encouraged to bring rugs and seating as chairs are not provided.  And, if bringing food and wine is too much to organise, then food supplies can be bought from the Company of Cook’s stall on site, with wine, beer and champagne available from a stand provided by local brewer Fuller Smith & Turner.

Events Manager for the company Mark Grainger said : “Performing outside at Chiswick brings many challenges.  To overcome these we’re planning a much larger stage than previously used for the Summer Opera events plus an enhanced sound system.”

Chiswick House Friends Opera Chairman Jan Grandison said: "We all hope that this is the start of a long and fruitful relationship between Focus Opera and the Friends to produce some outstanding entertainment and to help support our fundraising aims for Chiswick House.”

To win tickets please answer the following question:

Q;  Which new opera company will be performing at Chiswick House for the first time this summer?

Email your answer to info@neighbournet.com and remember you must be a registered member of the site to enter. The closing date is: Friday, 28th June.

For more information on the summer opera, visit www.chfriends.org.uk   and www.focusopera.com

June 21, 2013