Lecture on Cosi Fan Tutte

by Iain Ledingham

 

Tuesday 31st March 2020 at 8.00 pm 

 

Amersham Free Church

Woodside Road

Amersham

HP6 6AJ

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Our Festival features two performances of this great opera on April 16th and 18th. In this lecture Iain Ledingham, along with three of the cast, will demonstrate, with many musical illustrations, the wonderful marriage of Mozart’s music and Lorenzo da Ponte’s brilliant libretto. The music of Cosi Fan Tutte has an extraordinary sensuous beauty, once heard never forgotten. As Don Alfonso’s dangerous wager on the fidelity of two young ladies takes its course, composer and librettist explore the frailty of the human heart with penetrating insight and heartfelt sympathy - an operatic equivalent of the great novels of Jane Austen.

 

In the course of the lecture this will be illustrated with arias, duets and recitatives performed by our ensemble of exceptionally talented singers.

 

Iain Ledingham founded the Amersham Festival of Music in 1983 along with Richard Steele, our first Chairman. Iain has been a Professor at the Royal Academy of Music for many years, working primarily with singers, and was the first Director of Opera for Royal Academy Opera – the Academy’s very successful course for advanced operatic singers. Mozart has always been his favourite composer, particularly the operas and piano concertos. He spent seven years on the music staff of Glyndebourne Festival Opera, experiencing at first hand the exceptional quality of their Mozart productions and playing harpsichord continuo in many performances there of operas by Mozart and Rossini.

 

 

Tickets: £12 (adults), Students Free *

 

 

* Students  and under 16’s free. Free student tickets must be pre-booked online. Under 16’s must be accompanied by a paying adult.