Giving opera a go

Thursday, 18th February 2010

What are 50 teenagers doing at Glyndebourne? Henrietta Bredin finds out

This is not the Glyndebourne that most people see — there are no picnic hampers and champagne bottles, nobody tottering across the lawn in unwisely high heels, not a dinner jacket in sight. Instead, milling around purposefully, splitting up into groups and heading for different rehearsal and practice rooms, are groups of teenagers clutching bottles of water and music scores. They’re all part of a wonderfully ambitious epic-scale youth opera project called Knight Crew.

The opera is by composer Julian Philips with a libretto by Nicky Singer based on her children’s book of the same title and has been devised in close collaboration with director John Fulljames and conductor Nicholas Collon. Alongside them, being followed by a BBC film crew, is Gareth Malone, acting as chorus master and galvanising the young people, who form the 50-strong chorus, into giving the musical and dramatic performances of their lives.

The entire sprawling, riotous, overflowing but organically controlled project is the brainchild of Katie Tearle, Glyndebourne’s head of education, who for some years now has gleefully been puncturing the perception of opera that still persists in some quarters as a bizarre and moribund artform. ‘Our mission,’ she says, and it’s not just glib phrase-spinning, ‘is to enrich people’s lives through opera. That can be done by selling tickets to the operas in the summer Festival and also by this sort of community project [the first one was back in 1990, on Hastings Pier], which in the case of Knight Crew is written both for young people to perform and for young audiences.’

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