Audio Samples
Biography
Press Photos
The NarrOpera Trio
Narropera is an exciting new presentation format for the 21st century audience, intimate and direct. One singer, one violinist, and a keyboard player/narrator form a chamber music trio, which aims to make truly accessible one of the least accessible of art forms, opera. Beautiful singing and playing, clear story telling, insight into the historical and social backgrounds to each story, translations of each aria text – all these combine to transport the listener into the world of the composer and his librettist, and their joint poetry. Each narropera performance threads entertaining and enlightening narrative between eight to ten arias from a single work, in most cases an opera, though sometimes a dramatic oratorio or, in one particular case, a fascinating chamber-cyclical collection of arias. Most narropera presentations involve the interpretation of multiple characters by the one singer, especially if the chosen work is an 18th century opera.
The narropera format highlights two significant performing traditions: the antique tradition of combining music and story-telling to entertain and edify and the centuries old tradition of creating arrangements of complex works for chamber music forces for wider dissemination of the works themselves. Each narropera presentation lasts around 70-75 minutes and is presented without interval, so as to maximise the inherent power of the music/story-telling format.
The narropera format was invented as a response to the sudden lack of theatres and traditional performing venues in Christchurch, New Zealand, as a result of the catastrophic earthquake that destroyed most of the city’s centre, in 2011. However, the immediate success of the new format, initially only planned as a stop-gap for a specific disaster, led to a fuller development of narropera, each new title becoming an exciting ‘work in progress’, with an on-going refinement of form and content and pursuit of the optimal relationship between each.
The Narropera Trio consists of soprano Dorothee Jansen; violinist Hanns Heinz Odenthal (Europe) or Jan van den Berg (Australasia); and Haydn Rawstron, who plays keyboard continuo and provides the narrative thread through each narropera performance. For more information, visit www.narropera.com.
The Jansen Grier Duo
Dorothee Jansen’s work with Francis Grier involves more than Schubert songs; she has also performed Grier’s own compositions, including performances of his dramatic cantata Around The Curve of the World in Canterbury Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, in Nottingham England and in Christchurch New Zealand.
Francis Grier, a leading English chamber music pianist and composer (especially of vocal and choral-orchestral music) was Cambridge-trained and began his career in one of Britain’s most prestigious choral positions, as organist, tutor and head of music at Christ Church, Oxford. He gave the first ever BBC Prom solo concert, in 1985. He splits his work between composing, playing chamber music and performing as a psychonanalyst in his own practice. Among Francis’ compositions from the last four years are two Mass settings for St Paul’s Cathedral, London, Missa Aedes Christi for Christ Church, Oxford, ‘….lit by holy fire’ for King’s College Cambridge, ‘Cantemus’ for Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, and ‘Prayer’ commissioned for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and performed before Her Majesty in Glasgow Cathedral in 2013. Francis is also part of a piano trio, The Grier Trio, along with his two brilliant daughters (violinist Savitri Grier and cellist Indira Grier).
Lansdown Summer Festival
The next festival will take place in February 2015 with narropera performances of Mozart’s ‘Le nozze di Figaro’, ‘Don Giovanni’ and ‘La clemenza di Tito’, all three given by The Narropera Trio, recitals of violin sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven, and performances of the Tennyson/Richard Strauss melodrama ‘Enoch Arden’ presented by New Zealand’s most distinguished theatre company, The Court Theatre.
