Aylesbury Opera - Registered Charity Number 1192416

  • Home
  • Next performance
    • Theodora
    • Join the Chorus
  • About Us
    • Aylesbury Opera
    • Creative Team
  • Past Productions
    • Carmelites 2025
    • La Boheme 2024
    • Rake's Progress 2023
    • Jenufa 2022
    • Cav & Pag 2020
    • Samson et Dalila 2019
    • Turn of the Screw 2018
    • Norma 2018
    • Otello 2017
    • Noye's Fludde 2016
    • Der Freischutz 2016
    • Albert Herring 2015
    • Macbeth 2014
    • Faust 2013
    • A Masked Ball 2012
  • Contact
  • More
    • Home
    • Next performance
      • Theodora
      • Join the Chorus
    • About Us
      • Aylesbury Opera
      • Creative Team
    • Past Productions
      • Carmelites 2025
      • La Boheme 2024
      • Rake's Progress 2023
      • Jenufa 2022
      • Cav & Pag 2020
      • Samson et Dalila 2019
      • Turn of the Screw 2018
      • Norma 2018
      • Otello 2017
      • Noye's Fludde 2016
      • Der Freischutz 2016
      • Albert Herring 2015
      • Macbeth 2014
      • Faust 2013
      • A Masked Ball 2012
    • Contact
  • Home
  • Next performance
    • Theodora
    • Join the Chorus
  • About Us
    • Aylesbury Opera
    • Creative Team
  • Past Productions
    • Carmelites 2025
    • La Boheme 2024
    • Rake's Progress 2023
    • Jenufa 2022
    • Cav & Pag 2020
    • Samson et Dalila 2019
    • Turn of the Screw 2018
    • Norma 2018
    • Otello 2017
    • Noye's Fludde 2016
    • Der Freischutz 2016
    • Albert Herring 2015
    • Macbeth 2014
    • Faust 2013
    • A Masked Ball 2012
  • Contact
St Mary's Church Wendover, HP22 6NL

Come & Sing Verdi !

Saturday 13th September 10am-5pm


A chance to sing choruses from La Traviata and ‘Va pensiero' from Nabucco by Giuseppe Verdi.

Led by Adrian Thompson, this is a one-day choral workshop with professional soloists.


Registration from 9.15am

Informal sing-through at 4pm


Singers £20 (under-21s free) including sheet music.

click here TO REGisTER

Verdi's 'Don Carlo' Taster Workshop - Sun 9th Nov

Workshop

Join us for an afternoon exploring Verdi's grand opera, Don Carlo. We will be performing this at the DEMBE Theatre, Tring in March 2026. This workshop is aimed at introducing the music and story of this incredible opera. 


Led by Director Emma Large and Musical Director Sam Laughton, we will learn the music from one scene and then stage it. This is will be a very accessible and supportive workshop, open to all levels of experience. 

click here to Reserve your place

The opera

Set in the court of Philip II at the height of the 16th century Spanish Empire, Don Carlo tells of love thwarted by high politics and the ever present menace of the Inquisition. Verdi wrote the piece for Paris and it was premiered as a 5-act opera in French in 1867. It has been performed in many different versions, even in Verdi's lifetime. We will present the 4-act version in Italian (1884).

REVIEW: Opera Magazine – July 2025 issue

Aylesbury Opera at DEMBE Theatre, Tring: Dialogues of the Carmelites Mar 30

The second-to-last thing we might expect of a commuter-belt opera group is that they’d opt to stage, of all works, Francis Poulenc’s dark magnum opus. The last thing? That it would be this good. Aylesbury Opera has a long record of pushing the repertoire envelope (the company has mounted The Rake’s Progress and Jenůfa in the 2020s alone) and its policy of casting young professionals alongside an amateur chorus and semi-pro orchestra clearly works.


It helps that the musical director is Sam Laughton, who also conducts London’s enterprising Elysian Singers. He knows his way around a thorny score, the trickier the better, and he shaped a disparate bunch of freelancers, instrumental teachers and talented youngsters into an assured pit band. That use of ‘pit’ is a little generous. The 26 players were, rather, arrayed at floor level in front of a low but wide proscenium arch, which meant they got first dibs at the spectators’ eardrums. Balance issues, probably unavoidable, led to inaudibility from a few of the more tentative soloists, notably in the opera’s opening scene. The highest praise for these musicians is that the audience took the orchestra’s panache for granted.


The director, still in her early 20s, is a local prodigy. Emma Large’s CV is a work in progress but she handled La Bohèmefor the company last spring and on this year’s showing she is a thoughtful creative leader. Dialogues of the Carmelites is the very devil of an opera to make kinetically engaging (the title says it all: it’s mainly a succession of talking, or singing, heads) yet the young theatre-maker found an effective visual language using little more than two different designs of wooden chair. Poulenc’s final Salve Regina was devastating in its stylized simplicity, perhaps the best solution I’ve seen to staging this mass execution.


The soprano Robyn Pullen’s intelligent portrayal of Blanche de la Force progressed impressively from pallid idealist to committed heroine, and she delivered the exemplary 1959 English translation by Joseph Machlis with a bright clear tone, and a graceful musicality. To present Blanche at first as a blank canvas made sense as it set her character off on a well-defined journey of self-discovery. Other striking performances came from Jacqueline Varsey as the new Prioress, Isobel Hughes as Mother Marie and, most impressively, Camilla Foster Mitchell, who was a ball of youthful energy as Blanche’s friend Sister Constance.


Aylesbury Opera’s singers might have benefitted from a more focused approach to Personenregie. There was too much physical aimlessness among the less experienced stage performers so opportunities to develop detailed character relationships, the most vital task for any director, went begging. Blocking, too, was sometimes rudimentary, especially in the tense second-act encounter between Blanche and her brother. Only when the charismatic mezzo-soprano Salome Siu as the dying Madame de Croissy grabbed the show and shook it to life did a spontaneous stage energy take wing. Casting directors please note.


Mark Valencia


Copyright © 2025 Aylesbury Opera - All Rights Reserved.


Powered by