More details about Tom Coult’s chamber opera with playwright Alice Birch have been announced: Violet, a co-production by Music Theatre Wales, Aldeburgh Festival and Theater Magdeburg will be staged across the UK in the summer and autumn of 2020.
A full-length piece of around 80 minutes, for four singers and ensemble of 14 players, the opera has already been shortlisted for the prestigious FEDORA – GENERALI Prize for Opera. Richard Baker will conduct the London Sinfonietta, with the rest of the cast and creative team to be announced shortly.
Loosely inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Devil in the Belfry, the opera concerns the inhabitants of a village which begins losing hours from its day – one night, an hour disappears. On day two, two hours are missing, on day three, three are gone. Our story takes place over 24 increasingly short days, as time drains from the world, until the opera snaps shut as the final hour vanishes.