About The Production
There are few occasions on which Cape Town Opera and the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra appear together in full glory. The Duet Endowment Trust Gala is one of them: an event built to showcase both companies at their best, and one of the largest in the city’s classical calendar.
The programme differs with each gala, but its character does not. Expect overtures that open the evening at full tilt, bel canto duets that have made careers, ensembles in which four or five voices weave separate lines into something no single voice could achieve, and arias audiences have loved for two centuries. Some galas take a different shape altogether and give the whole evening over to a single monumental choral work.
The forces are substantial either way. Cape Town Opera’s House Soloists, Judith Neilson Young Artists, the Vocal Ensemble and Children’s Chorus appear alongside the full orchestra accompanied by acclaimed international guest singers.
Behind the evening lies a serious purpose. The Duet Endowment Trust was founded by Mrs Wendy Ackerman and is now chaired by her grandson, Nicholas Ackerman, with a straightforward aim: to preserve the legacy of Cape Town Opera and the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra. World-class performing arts cannot survive on ticket sales alone, and an endowment is how an institution outlives the year it is in.
The gala is an evening where pleasure and purpose point in the same direction: great singing, a great orchestra, and securing a future for both.
About The Production
Each Easter, Cape Town Opera joins forces with the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra at the Toringkerk in Paarl. The concert has become one of the fixed cultural highlights of the year, and the programme changes each season, drawn from the great sacred works by composers who wrote some of their most ambitious music for the church.
Sacred choral writing asks for scale rather than intimacy, requiring a full chorus with solo voices carrying long lines above it, and an orchestra adding momentum. Composers from Bach and Handel through Haydn, Mozart, Verdi and Fauré returned to these forms throughout their careers, and the results include some of the most powerful music ever written for voices.
A church interior does something to massed voices that no concert hall quite matches; the sound crescendos, lingers and takes its time to fade, and the works were written with exactly that in mind. Paarl in autumn, an hour’s drive from Cape Town, makes the trip part of the occasion.
Audiences come back every year regardless of which work is being performed: a testament to both the tradition and the quality.
About The Production
Some concerts are events, but this one is a tradition. Each December, Cape Town Opera and the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra fill St George’s Cathedral for O Holy Night, and the combination of carols, candlelight and that particular acoustic has made it one of the warmest nights in the city’s calendar.
The forces are considerable: the orchestra is joined by Cape Town Opera’s House Soloists, Judith Neilson Young Artists, Vocal Ensemble, Children’s Chorus and Foundation Studio, together with the St George’s Cathedral Choir. Hearing that many voices in a stone building is a physical experience as much as a musical one.
At sixty-five minutes without an interval, it is built for families and for anyone who wants an evening rather than a late night. Children are welcome, and so is anyone who has not sung in public since last December. It is not a complicated proposition. Great voices, a full orchestra and organ, a beautiful building, and the Christmas carols you have known your whole life.