Performances

Benjamin Irvine-Capel is a Choral Scholar of Exeter Cathedral and a recent graduate of Genesis Sixteen.

He has previously been in Portsmouth Cathedral Choir and a Chorister of St Paul’s Cathedral.  

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Since moving to Devon, he has performed as soloist for multiple groups including Wellington Choral Society, the Winkleigh Singers, the Three Spires Singers, Exmouth Choral Society, and at Powderham Castle, as well as a member of the Dumnonii Consort.

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Further afield, he participated in Collegium Vocale Gent’s Bach Academy Bruges 2025 and now tours with the group to destinations such as South Korea, Germany, and The Netherlands. Closer to home, he continues to sing as a founder-member with Contrepoint – a recently founded eight-part consort – as well as deputising for Westminster Cathedral Choir and Lady Clare’s Consort.

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A recent graduate of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Lutenist Kristiina Watt now performs regularly with leading groups in the historical music scene and beyond, such as the Academy of Ancient Music, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC Singers, The English Concert, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and La Nuova Musica.

 

Kristiina plays a theorbo made by Klaus Jacobsen, a baroque guitar made by Dallas Sutherland and renaissance lutes by Martin Haycock.  She particularly enjoys working with singers and regularly plays for consorts such as Ensemble Pro Victoria, The Marian Consort, Musica Sereta and Vache Baroque.  She is featured on the Marian Consort’s latest CD ‘Un Poesia Muta’ in which her performance was reviewed as ’flawless’ by Gramophone Magazine.

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 For their second recital in this year’s Festival the Bloomsbury Baroque Ensemble concentrates on music of the eighteenth century, around the time of the revival of Shakespeare’s work led by David Garrick. It was Garrick’s celebration of Shakespeare’s Jubilee in 1769 that put Stratford on the tourist map for all enthusiasts for the Bard, and two composers of the time particularly close to the great actor were Thomas Arne and Charles Dibdin. Discover them and others still in this recital.

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Laurence Olivier and William Walton were near contemporaries - Walton born 1902 and Olivier 1907 - but despite each being famous, they had never met before their collaboration on a propaganda film project in the Second World War.

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A contemporary critic wrote in 1944 that Walton’s music for Henry V was “a score that ranks with the best in film music”.   Four years later they collaborated again on a film of Hamlet, which another critic described as “a masterpiece of the stage made into one of the greatest of films.”  Their collaboration led in 1955 to another film  Richard III which was equally well received, described in a review as “new art hand in hand with old genius”.

 

Michael Dobson will lead us through more than a decade of collaboration by a great actor with a great composer.  He is Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon and Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham.  His publications include: The Making of the National Poet; England's Elizabeth (with Nicola Watson); The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (with Stanley Wells); Performing Shakespeare's Tragedies Today; and Shakespeare and Amateur Performance.

For more than four centuries, Shakespeare’s characters and stories have shaped the arts in every form — literature, theatre, music and beyond. Opera, with its heightened emotions and grand expressive range, has always been especially drawn to the worlds he created. From Verdi’s searing Otello and Falstaff to Wagner’s early explorations of Shakespearean drama, from Gounod and Nicolai to Britten and Bernstein, the great composers could not resist the Bard’s blend of passion, wit, tragedy and enchantment.

In this gala evening, Rose Opera’s soloists bring these timeless stories to life with the immediacy and intimacy of voice and piano. Love and jealousy, fate and folly, magic and mischief — all the fire of Shakespeare’s imagination finds new resonance in the operatic masterpieces it inspired.

Join us for Operatic Shakespeare (or Love, Fate & Fire): a celebration of the Bard’s enduring power, refracted through the music of those who transformed his words into unforgettable sound.