As this dark hour ends...

This was the creation of a small show with the singers of the brilliant Mozart Residency that the Festival runs each year. The singers come from all over the world to work with a director/theatre practitioner, the amazing singing coach Susanna Eken and the brilliant pianists Ouri Bronchti and Bertrand Halary. We had two weeks to workshop with them - the first week working on technique and the second week working towards what turned out to be quite an ambitious staging of the work. It was extremely stressful given the disparity between what we wanted to achieve and the time we had to achieve it, but they were a fantastic group of artists and we managed to pull off something that was really quite special. It was deeply inspiring to work with singers near the beginning of their careers, and to introduce ways of working that will hopefully change their own expectations of what opera can be as the progress through their careers.