User:Scarabocchio/batignano

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dyk: many major british opera singers, conductors and directors started their careers in an Italian monastery?

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1. Musica nel Chiostro was an opera festival that ran from 1974 to 2004 in the former Convento di Santa Croce in Batignano, in southern Tuscany. ('complesso monastico')

+ summer / performances in open cloister or around the grounds

2. The festival specialised in early rare works and contemporary opera. / The festival featured unusual rep, with many rare early work, many first performances in modern times, as well as contemporary opera, including commissions from Italian and British composers, and the Italian premieres of works by Tippett, Britten and Bernstein. OR (use blurb text on 'works commissioned' approach so we can get Calvino in the same sentence (and the lede))

3. The festival was the brainchild of Adam Pollock, founded, bg

3b. british artists, early springboard / support from italians, calvino was a key supporter and contributed libretto/ text

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pollock was interior designer, set designer active in opera / the convento

birth of fest, originally a one-off / shift to brits / evolved with different political complexions i the local comune, provincia, regione

couple of rules were established early: in Batignano, everything always in italiano (always aimed at the locals from the village/ town, but attracted the rich from the castiglione enclave., Roccamare) and egalitarian

perfs outside Batignano? always sung in local lang (weaver's translation of calvino's text for uk perfs of Zaide)

challenge, local culturati

pollocks' "whatever took my fancy" from the film / restrictions of the spaces, orch size,

restrictions on budget .. (constraints aid creativity) lack of pay. people at the start of their careers, young artists, tim albery

esprit de corps mucking in / eating together trips to the beach

[A rather fine] Inside back-cover blurb in Heap of Stones (available here: https://warwickleadlay.com/products/a-heap-of-stones)

"Did you do Batignano?" is the phrase most used by the many people who worked in the seventeenth-century [monastery] which for thirty-one years was the home of the opera festival in southern Tuscany. This acted as a trampoline for a wide range of mainly British talent from singers like Lesley Garrett to composer Jonathan Dove; conductors, Jane Glover, Christian Curnyn and Ivor Bolton; directors such as Graham Vick, Richard Jones and Rupert Goold. Productions ranged from many first performances in modern times of forgotten baroque operas, to the first performances in Italy of Tippett's King Priam and Bernstein's Candide. Among new works commissioned festival were several by Stephen Oliver and Italo Calvino 's dazzling text for Mozart's unfinished Zaide. In 2004, the festival's founder, Adam Pollock, whose story this is, was made a CBE for services to music and Anglo-Italian relations.

— blurb

History

The festival was founded by ...

Basically a mix of local artisans and brits/

the festival was run on a shoestring, covering the travelling costs of the singers and crew, but no salaries were paid. Many young people at the beginnings of their career were happy/ prepared to work like this ["so"?] many now-famous directors, designers, conductors and singers had their professional debuts or important early breaks(?) in Batignano.

Anoter consequence was the wilingness to pitch-in, and there was a certain expectation to help paint/ sew/ .. and eat together. One fixed part of this that was commonly referred to by those that went was the shared washing up.

Supported by the locally-resident intelligensia .. Italo Calvino. valued support from Peter Moores Foundation,

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O004373?q=Batignano&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit

Batignano.

Village in Italy near Grosseto, Tuscany, the site of an opera festival since 1974. The festival, which takes place during July and August, was founded by the designer Adam Pollock on the site of a ruined monastery, Santa Croce; the theatre is an open-air cloister in which performances are given in the late evening by the company Musica nel Chiostro ('Music in the Cloister'). It was inaugurated by a performance of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, sung by a mixture of Italian and British artists, in which scene changes were accomplished by moving the audience from one part of the building to another.

http://www.scenofest.org/CVs/AdamPollock/AdamPollock.htm Adam Pollock worked as a designer mainly in opera ( Maggio Musicale, Opera North, Scottish Opera,and companies in Canada and the U.S.A.) He met Maria Bjornson in 1972 when they were both designing for the Wexford Festival and became close friends. In 1974 Pollock founded the Batignano Festival which in the following thirty years acted as a trampoline for many young directors, conductors, singers and designers included Richard Hudson, Anthony MacDonald, Nigel Lowrey, Tom Cairns, and Colin Richmond).