Gossip

OperaUpClose Song Cycle Aids Japanese???

OperaUpClose, the company behind the Whatsonstage.com and Olivier Award-winning La boheme, is holding a major fundraising concert for the Red Cross in Japan this Sunday 27 March 2011. The performance of a short song cycle for soprano, baritone and piano, and was specially commissioned just last week by OperaUpClose and is written by up-and-coming young opera composer Stephen Crowe. It uses facts, figures and images from the international press used to report to the Western world the human devastation occurring in Japan following this month’s earthquake and tsunami.

OperaUpClose artistic director Adam Spreadbury-Maher said: “OperaUpClose are responding in the only way we know how, with singing and music. Stephen Crowe has composed his song cycle for Japan in only seven days, and we hope to raise funds for the Red Cross but also awareness of the magnitude of this world-changing human event. This song cycle for Japan will perhaps ensure that we all know exactly what is going on, as the audience will experience the information, facts etc in a different way. It will arrest the audience, and ask them to meditate on the situation, which I hope will then provoke the appropriate action that our fellow human beings in Japan deserve.”

Song Cycle for Japan will be held at 3pm on Sunday at the 500-seat St Mary’s Church, Islington, directly across the road from OperaUpClose’s new home, London’s Little Opera House at the King’s Head Theatre on Upper Street N1. Tickets are priced from £10 to £100. Call the box office on 020 7478 0160 to book.