Nicholas Kok News
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2024-04-24
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2021-03-06 10:20:59
To counter the way memory disappears and fades into the background: composer Raymond Yiu on the ideas, both musical and personal, behind the works on his latest disc
[…] work, he has to work on its DNA, so that he might take a quotation and use this to create a tone row, the work's DNA, and from this create musical motifs, and from here he might improvise on the resulting motifs, though he does not use jazz specifically. The sense of living in a busy metropolis is another key element in his work. He was born in the busiest part of Hong Kong, Mong Kok which at the time was one of the densest populated areas of the world. Raymond is used to the crazy business of living in a busy city, and this comes over in the music. He loves quotation, allusion and pastiche but they collide, merge and overlap, as in living in a city where you are so close to other people and so overloaded with sound. The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured is the work on […]
2020-02-21 10:32:14
Opera North in 2020/21, new opera from Iain Bell and Will Todd, Handel's Alcina and a first Parsifal
[…] children from diverse and socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, to a youth orchestra for young people thinking of going into the music profession, as well as a Youth Company and the premiere of a new Will Todd opera. Read on to find out more.In Autumn 2020, Iain Bell's Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel will be given in Daniel Kramer's production originally seen at English National Opera [see Ruth's review] and will be conducted by Nicholas Kok. The opera will be seen in a newly re-worked version of the score. Dame Josephine Barstow and Lesley Garrett both reprise their roles, with Elin Pritchard joining the cast as Mary Kelly and with many roles taken by members of the Opera North Chorus.Edward Dick, who directed Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel in 2017 [see my review] directs Bizet's Carmen in Spring 2021 with Garry Walker conducting. The title role is sung by American mezzo-soprano […]
Royal Opera House (The Guardian)
2018-12-09 08:00:09
[…] home. Nothing mawkish there. Eighty-two thousand Leeds men volunteered in 1914. Some 10,000 didn’t return. The opera itself took place in the civic grandeur of Leeds Town Hall. A throng of 100 male voices – from Opera North and Opera North Youth choruses, students from the Royal Northern College of Music and a soldiers’ chorus made up of local singers – packed the stage, deftly weaving between an orchestra complete with harmonica and bagpipes. Nicholas Kok, conducting, marshalled his forces incisively.
2018-12-01 10:35:10
Images of Silent Night: Kevin Puts' opera at Opera North
Kevin Puts: Silent Night - Members of the Chorus of Opera North as Scottish and German soldiers - Opera North(Photo © Tristram Kenton) I recently interviewed American composer Kevin Puts about his Pullitzer Prize-winning opera Silent Night [see my interview] which has just received its UK premiere at Leeds Town Hall given by Opera North, directed by Tim Albery, conductor Nicholas Kok, with Maire Flavin, Rupert Charlesworth, Quirijn de Lang, Timothy Nelson, Richard Burkard, Geoffrey Dolton, with the chorus of Opera North, students from the Royal Northen College of Music, Opera North Youth Chorus and the Solider's Chorus - Community Singers.Now we are able to present a couple of pictures from the production (photographs by Tristram Kenton). The production runs until 7 December 2018, further details from the Opera North Website. Kevin Puts: Silent Night - Alex Banfield as Jonathan Dale, Christopher Nairne as William Dale and Rupert Charlesworth […]
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