Originally posted at Limelight Magazine:

We speak to Australian musicians working around the world about how they are responding to the challenges of teaching music remotely.

By Angus McPherson on April 21, 2020

Many musicians supplement their performing income with teaching work – but just as the concert halls and theatres are closed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, with social distancing measures in force and students staying home from school, music lessons are also being put on hold. Suddenly, music teachers around the country are having to adapt to a new world in which online lessons are the only way to continue making a living. Meanwhile, performing artists facing down the prospect of months without any of their regular income streams are finding ways to make ends meet by offering online Continue reading →

Originally posted at Tempo: a Quarterly Review of New Music:

When Eleanor Knight began researching her libretto for Silk Moth, she had to decide how to frame an opera about honour violence. Meeting women whose lives it had ruptured through the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, she confronted the usual images that accompany the dozen-or-so honour killings per year in the UK media. Between the ‘old, faded school photos’ that illustrate victimhood and the male perpetrators with ‘blankets over their heads … shoved into waiting police cars’, she saw a gulf of painful complexity. ‘What’, she asks, ‘of the mothers?’.¹
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London, 25 September 2019

Gothic Opera, a brand new London opera company, is set to launch its first season this Hallowe’en with an atmospheric, vibrant and irreverent production of Der Vampyr by Heinrich Marschner. Taking the dark, eerie intensity of gothic fiction as its starting point, Gothic Opera is dedicated to rarely-performed and atmospheric operatic works, and is committed to opening opera up to new audiences, hoping to inspire people to come and experience opera in unusual, characterful and spooky spaces.
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Originally posted at I Care If You Listen:

A chaplaincy service says it’s becoming an increasingly worrying time for workers on big ships and how important is it to teach LGBT lessons at primary school? [in which Silk Moth librettist Eleanor Knight and I discuss Ruthless Jabiru’s forthcoming production Silk Moth for Grimeborn Festival (2:49:00)]

Originally posted at Composers Edition:

Ruthless Jabiru presents Bushra El-Turk’s hard-hitting opera Silk Moth alongside works by Liza Lim and Cassandra Miller at the Arcola Theatre in London’s East End, August 9-11. Composers Edition’s Dan Goren caught up with the pioneering musical director Kelly Lovelady to find out more.

Dan Goren: Tell me how you’ve come to be producing this first fully-staged production of Silk Moth and what drew you to it.

Kelly Lovelady: I had been wanting to programme something of Bushra’s for years so when I had the chance to dream up some new programme ideas I went through her works list with a fine comb. The instrumentation of Silk Moth for a single vocalist and mixed ensemble of four Western and Middle Eastern instrumentalists struck me as an  Continue reading →

Ruthless Jabiru welcomes lauded British-Egyptian mezzo Camille Maalawy to perform the principal role of Mother in the orchestra’s forthcoming production Silk Moth for Grimeborn Festival 2019.

Maalawy has won critical acclaim for her passion and expressiveness across Arabic and Sephardic song in addition to continuing success on the opera and concert stage. Her Continue reading →

Originally posted at eleanorknight2016 :

“What would you say to your dead wife or daughter if she were still here?”

“I would say that I acted out of love, and I know that she would understand.”

This  exchange appears in Witold Szablowski’s collection of reportage from Turkey, The Assassin from Apricot City and simply and devastatingly illustrates the complexity of ‘honour’.

Honour, as I understand it as I sit here tapping away in East Sussex, is about acting with ethical integrity, with an awareness of a higher purpose, of doing the best one can as a human being.

But what about ‘honour’ so destructive that it leads to the violent deaths of 5,000 women a year worldwide, including about a dozen in the UK?
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