Theatron Oneiron present the first concert of our 2018 season, in collaboration with period instrumentalists from The Bate Players. Our programme explores the pleasures of love in the lighter works of Claudio Monteverdi, through a soirée-style selection of uplifting solo songs and arias, intimately enthralling chamber duets, and passionate semi-staged opera scenes, interspersed with five-part madrigals. Ranging from the exquisitely beauteous and poignant to the comic, and from the mildly flirtatious to the ardent, the amorous and the erotic, Monteverdi’s music presented in our programme (settings of texts by Guarini, Striggio, Busenello, Rinuccini and others) captures the diversity of the personal experience of romantic love: in its bliss, its fullness of emotion, its spirituality, its power and its passion.
With a line-up including current and former singers from the Royal College of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Royal Conservatory of The Hague, Hochschule für Musik, Mainz, and the Choirs of The Queen’s and Merton Colleges, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge, this is set to be an incredible performance, not to be missed!
Theatron Oneiron is an early opera and early music production company, founded and run by current and former students of the University of Oxford, and one of the leading student-run opera companies specialising in early opera in the south-east of England. In 2016, Theatron Oneiron presented Monteverdi’s earliest opera, L’Orfeo, in a fully staged production, with an international cast featuring current and former singers from a range of the leading conservatoires of Britain and Europe, including the Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Royal Conservatory of the Hague, Conservatorium van Amsterdam, Hochschüle fur Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin, Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, and Royal College of Music, Stockholm. Currently based in Oxford, Theatron Oneiron regularly puts on high-standard concerts around the city and seeks to bridge the divide common in early music performance between the performance of consort and of musico-dramatic works, through combining solo, dramatic and consort works across its projects.