Annelies
Kennedy Center · Millennium Stage · 2018
07 · Opera
Words for
music
Librettos and texts for opera, oratorio and choral music.
Librettos · music
The works
2005 — present2016
Pleasure
Chamber opera · Mark Simpson
Royal Opera · Opera North · Aldeburgh Music
A reworking of the Hephaestus myth inside a northern English gay club. Co-commissioned by the Royal Opera, Aldeburgh Music and Opera North, the production was directed by Tim Albery, starred Lesley Garrett and toured in 2016. It received its German premiere in January 2023 at the Theater Erfurt, in an immersive staging that turned the studio into the club itself.
Further details2015
The Immortal
Oratorio · Mark Simpson
South Bank Sky Arts Award · BBC Proms
A work about Frederic Myers, Victorian séances and the fate of love in a universe stripped of religious certainty. Commissioned by Manchester International Festival and premiered by the BBC Philharmonic, it won the 2016 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Classical Music and received its London premiere at the 2017 BBC Proms under Juanjo Mena.
Further details2007
Stolen Voices
Choral work · Tarik O’Regan
Imperial War Museum · UN International Day of Peace
An adaptation of young people’s wartime diaries for soprano, children’s and adult choirs, harp and string quintet. Commissioned by the Jewish Music Institute in association with the United Nations Children in Armed Conflict Division for the United Nations International Day of Peace 2007, and presented at the Imperial War Museum, London.
Further details2005
Annelies
Oratorio · James Whitbourn
2013 Grammy nominee · performed internationally
The first authorised libretto drawn from Anne Frank’s diary. Commissioned for the sixtieth anniversary of the Holocaust, the complete work was premiered by Leonard Slatkin, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge. Its 2012 Naxos recording was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance, and the work continues to be performed around the world.
Further details
Watch & listen
Pleasure
Opera North · official teaser
The premiere recording was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and is not currently available to stream; the score and full performing details are held by Boosey & Hawkes. Work details
From the press
“Melanie Challenger has fashioned an elegiac libretto from the poetic pages of the Diary of Anne Frank which James Whitbourn sets with such tender respect it’s almost impossible to hear without tears.”
“The sound of church bells, the drone of aircraft, and finally the stifling silence of the camps add discreet detail to a score whose respectful understatement is its greatest strength.”
“A blazingly original oratorio.”
“The most thrilling new choral work I have heard for years. Simpson and his librettist, the poet Melanie Challenger, match the grandeur of those epic avant-garde choral pieces.”
“The perfect operatic subject: squalid and earthbound yet imbued with a radiant, almost mythic quality.”