Guildhall School of Music & Drama has announced its Autumn Season of events, which will be delivered digitally and free of charge.
From late-September 2020, online audiences will be able to enjoy a mixture of live broadcast and pre-recorded content from across all departments, created, performed and filmed at Guildhall School with the required social distancing.
Soprano Julia Bullock will be welcomed as Artist in Residence at Guildhall School for the seasons 2020–2022. Known for her versatile artistry and probing intellect, Bullock will draw on her depth of experience to work with Vocal students in masterclasses and performance projects, guiding them on programming and on developing their own creative processes.
Guildhall’s Autumn Season music events include the rescheduled Gold Medal final – the school’s most prestigious prize, this year celebrating instrumentalists – and the return of Takuo Yuasa to conduct the Guildhall Symphony Orchestra in a programme of Dvořák, Janáček, and Sibelius.
Guildhall School’s Autumn drama productions include a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Suba Das, and a new devised piece entitled Pod co-created by Jamie Bradley and Vicki Igbokwe, made with the Company.
Students on the BA Performance and Creative Enterprise (PACE) programme will also share a series of self-devised works in a three-day online festival called Chapters, complemented by a regular series of conversations with inspiring guest speakers throughout the season.
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The opera department presents a triple bill of Italian works directed by Stephen Medcalf and conducted by Head of Opera Dominic Wheeler: Mascagni’s Zanetto; Wolf-Ferrari’s Il segreto di Susanna (Susanna’s Secret); and Donizetti’s Two men and a woman (Rita).
The Guildhall Jazz department will present the first in a year-long series of concerts charting the history of big band, beginning with the 1920s and 1930s.
Masterclasses and curated concerts will take place with artists including pianists Stephen Hough, Imogen Cooper, Iain Burnside and Julius Drake; composers Jonathan Dove and Alison Bauld; and singers Kate Royal and Roderick Williams.
The school’s Research Works seminars continue in online format throughout the season, in which staff, students and visiting speakers discuss the findings of their ongoing research.
All content will be available to watch online, for free, via Guildhall School’s website. To account for social distancing, ground-breaking low-latency technology will be used to enable larger ensembles to perform together in real time from from across different venues at the school.
Staged productions will feature the work of the school’s production arts department, created in collaboration with the Opera and Drama departments in accordance with safety and social distancing guidelines.
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