Home - The Opera Story

Episodes

We have been busy creating some new work in a safe, socially-distanced manner, and are very pleased to present our new series of short songs, “Episodes”. It brings together several young composers and librettists to create a series of short clips featuring emerging singers and musicians.

The episodes will revolve around the current crisis, some with positive messages and some rather on the side of situational comedy, highlighting some of the human qualities that the situation brings up in a light-hearted manner. Some of them will be stand-alone, and some will follow a story over a few episodes

We hope you enjoy them! Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel or follow us on social media so that you don’t miss the next ones!

If you wish to support this work, you can do it by donating an amount of your choice using the link below. Thank you!

Donate

About Us

We believe that opera is an immensely rich art form that remains relevant to today’s world, and are committed to maintaining its vitality by contributing to the renewal and expansion of the repertory.

To do this, we commission new and exciting work from up-and-coming composers, that we produce and perform with a new generation of opera talent in site-specific productions in intimate and unusual venues around Peckham.

We invite you to follow us on this journey, and re-discover these stories that you thought you knew well, re-told through the language of opera!

We made our debut with Snow, presenting the work of three composers using the three floors of The Bussey Building, a former cricket bat factory. Then we took over the Copeland Gallery with a production that combined the stories of Goldilocks and The Three Little Pigs and showed them under new light. For our third year, we returned to the Bussey Building with a new multi-floor production retelling the story of Robin Hood.

Our fourth opera, Pandora’s Box, was postponed with the ongoing health crisis, but we hope it will take place in February 2021.

Media / News

"A swinish pearl of an opera"The Observer, on Goldilocks
"A subtle and beautifully achieved piece of work"Opera, on Goldilocks
"Done with zest (some great singing from all), and with a beautifully precise, well-played score."The Observer, on Robin Hood
"A strong and absorbing evening"The Observer, on Snow

Our Team

bio

Artistic Director Hamish comes from the performance side of opera. His main goal in co-founding The Opera Story is to contribute to ensuring the future of opera, by commissioning new works to be written and performed.

Hamish Mackay

Artistic Director

bio

Executive Director and co-founder Manuel has a professional career in the financial services industry, and is now applying his expertise to the administration of the company and to securing resources for its stable funding.

Manuel Fajardo

Executive Director

bio

Henrietta is deputy editor of Opera magazine and is a writer, editor, producer and late-onset mezzo-soprano. She has published articles in The Spectator, The Guardian and The Telegraph, in theatre and opera programmes, and has devised narrated song recitals that have been performed at festivals throughout the UK.

Henrietta Bredin

Trustee

bio

Antony is a Trustee of The Opera Story. An economist and consultant, his career has been in management consulting in the UK and Asia and he is currently doing a PhD in Musicology.

Antony Feeny

Trustee

bio

Leigh, “the emergent specialist of 20th-century opera” (Financial Times), has carved out a formidable reputation for the performance of new works and dramatic 20th century repertoire.

Leigh Melrose

Trustee

The Venue

CLF Art Café The Bussey Building

133 Rye Lane
London
SE15 4ST

We are delighted to return to the CLF Art Café / Bussey Building in Peckham, where we performed our sold-out productions Snow in 2017 and Robin Hood in 2019. This live performance and clubbing complex corresponds very well to what we want to achieve with our productions, which is to allow you to feel the magic of opera as close as possible, and to break the distance between the performers and the public. Our production used two floors of the building, each of them representing part of the universe that the characters in our opera inhabit.