As 2023 comes to an end, MTW has shared their highlights of 2023 – working in multiple forms and with the widest range of creatives, embracing live performance, digital works, young creatives and street art. MTW currently has seven pieces in commission and ambitious plans for the future.
Accolades and Awards
In November, MTW was delighted their co-commission with Opera Philadelphia – Denis & Katya by Philip Venables and Ted Huffman – reached the Top 10 most performed contemporary operas world-wide. We offer huge congratulations to Phil and Ted and are thrilled that this highly original work continues to reach new audiences.
MTW’s 2022 production of Violet by Tom Coult and Alice Birch – a co-production with Britten Pears Arts/Aldeburgh Festival and the London Sinfonietta – continued to garner praise with two further major nominations during 2023: The South Bank Sky Arts Awards and the Classical IVORS (following the UK Theatre Awards and International Opera Awards in 2022). MTW were delighted that Tom Coult was awarded the Critics’ Circle Award for Young Composers, with special reference to Violet. Tom’s opera has already received two new productions – in Germany in 2022 and in France in 2023 (which will be revived during 2024).
2023 saw an unusual connection between MTW and the newly crowned Nobel Laureate for Literature, Jon Fosse. As director of the contemporary opera studio for Norway, MTW Artistic Director Michael McCarthy had supported the development of the only opera based on one of Jon Fosse’s plays – Someone is Going to Come – and directed the world premiere production. The hope is that the opera, by composer Knut Vaage, will now receive greater attention.
Performance Work
The year began with a co-production with Fio of The Jollof House Party Opera by Tumi Williams and Sita Thomas – a joyous, and short, hip-hop opera and food experience which we shared with audiences at community venues in Wrexham, Haverfordwest and Cardiff. This piece demonstrated the huge potential for expanding the musical and cultural base of what might be conceived as opera.
During the summer MTW launched another new operatic form for Wales – STREET ART OPERA – including an introductory workshop followed by an open call for Welsh artists to submit proposals for future Street Art Operas. The audience feedback from the presentations in Bangor, Haverfordwest and Cardiff was enthusiastic. The response to the Call-Out was overwhelming, with 26 extraordinary proposals almost entirely from artists new to opera and MTW.
As the year ends, MTW is presenting their second Future Directions Digital Opera – Perthyn (To Belong) – on their website, following a cinema premiere for the creative team of young people and the four creative facilitators (composer Mari Mathias, dramaturg Jain Boon, filmmaker Gavin Porter and opera singer Llio Evans). Future Directions is MTW’s programme for young people including young people with learning disabilities and/or autism, and neurodivergent young people, and is a partnership programme with Hijinx. We are proudly presenting the bilingual digital opera they created during 2023 – Perthyn – as a Music Theatre Wales production.
Commissions
In February 2024, MTW will be releasing the next two digital shorts commissioned from outstanding creatives who are all new to opera – Francesca Amewudah-Rivers and Connor Allen and Simmy Singh and Myah Jeffers. As with earlier digital pieces, MTW is deliberately asking what opera is and what it can be, putting storytelling in music at its heart but breaking all the other rules that are applied to style of music, story told, form and format, and most importantly who is creating it. They are intentionally selecting artists who are already clearly exploring storytelling in music but who would not normally have access to what we might call opera. MTW believe this is the most exciting way to progress the artform they love and ensure it is something that is about who they are now as a company, and not who they once were.
In August 2024, MTW will work in partnership with Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru, Aberystwyth Music Centre and Sinfonia Cymru on the creation of another innovative music theatre event: a Welsh language performance featuring a newly composed operatic monodrama for tenor and five instrumentalists by composer Conor Mitchell and director/dramaturg Jac Ifan Moore. This will be performed alongside a newly created piece by Eddie Ladd, presenting her take on the original poem Atgof by Prosser Rhys. This programme springs from the centenary of Atgof winning the Chair at the 1924 National Eisteddfod and the impact the response to the poem had on Prosser Rhys. The production will tour in Wales in autumn 2024.
Also in 2024, MTW will be presenting the newly commissioned Street Art Operas at a time and location yet to be confirmed. These creations will come to life on walls in Wales – in Welsh, English and Arabic, as street art, as operas, as animation, as storytelling in music, and as opera as activism.
Company Development
MTW were delighted to be included in the new portfolio of funded companies by Arts Council of Wales in their Investment Review, being awarded standstill funding. Whilst they acknowledge the decision as a powerful endorsement of the new vision and mission of MTW, and the tough times we are all living in, MTW want to make it clear that by the end of this period of funding, they will have been on standstill support for 10 years.
MTW became a member of Black Lives in Music and continue to seek advice and support to help develop their work to achieve greater equality, diversity, and inclusion. This partnership enables them to check their thinking and share ideas with a partner who will bring many insights and experience, initiated by an inspiring session from their Director of Operations Roger Wilson. They will work together over the coming years to address some of the structural challenges facing Black artists and workers in opera and the music industries.
MTW continues to work with Artistic Associate Elayce Ismail, whose expertise, knowledge and insight brings so much to the company. Her creative partnership with composer Alex Ho (MTW had introduced Elayce and Alex and invited them to collaborate on the first New Directions digital piece AMAZON in 2020) continued this year with a new song cycle for the Oxford Song Festival, with a compelling tale reflecting on the damage we are doing to our planet and a truly fantastic way in which it might yet survive catastrophe.
Kathryn Joyce has joined the team as General Manager during 2023, just in time to help deliver the successful bid to the ACW Investment Review and was then joined by Catrin Slater as fundraiser. Communications and Marketing Manager Rachel Kinchin will leave at the end of the year, as she forges ahead with her own arts, wellness and inclusion projects.
In December 2023, MTW Chair Christine Bradwell is handing the reins over to Chair Designate Kerry Skidmore. Music Theatre Wales would like to share their deepest gratitude to Christine for helping lead the company through some tricky waters, including Covid 19 and a radical review and re-shaping of the company and its workover the last 6 years. Kerry joins the board with rich experience from working with young people in Peckham and with Multistory.