Name: Hugh the Drover
Start: 2010-11-18T00:00:00.000Z
End: 2010-11-18T00:00:00.000Z
Location: Town Hall

Organization

Singer

Soprano

Celeste Lazarenko

Mary

Mezzo-soprano

Clarissa Meek

Aunt Jane

Tenor

Daniel Norman

Hugh the Drover

Baritone

Simon Thorpe

John the Butcher

Grant Doyle

Sergeant

Showman

Gareth Huw John

Turnkey

Conductor

Nicholas Jenkins

Set designer

Yann Seabra

Costume designer

Giulia Scrimieri

Lighting designer

William Reynolds

Bass

William Robert Allenby

The Constable

Tim Locke

Shellfish seller

Red Gray

A Ballad-Seller

Fiona Baines

Susan

Richard Fisher

Robert

Rachel Rogers

Wendy

Stage director

Michael Moxham

New Sussex Opera

Others

NSO Chorus

Orchestra

NSO Orchestra

NSO Children’s Chorus

Lewes

United Kingdom

Town Hall

Hugh the Drover Ralph Vaughan Williams

Public

Private

Approved

Vaughan Williams’ poignantly beautiful ballad opera was written just before the First World War, with the final touches added on the composer’s return from war. It opens with a huge fair scene, with various chorus members taking step-out roles as salespeople (a cheap jack, wearing a costume laden with watches, a shellfish seller, a ballad seller and a primrose seller among them), singing market cries that Vaughan Williams had collected on his journeys in England gathering folk melodies while they were still in the public memory.

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The costumes gave an impoverished, bedraggled look to the chorus of Cotswold villagers. Into their midst arrived a posse of child morris dancers, and a showman offering money for a prize fight: the latter meant setting up a boxing ring during involved chorus music, for the fight between John the Butcher and Hugh the Drover. Fortuitously one of our chorus members, Richard Bennett, had been an army boxing champion and was able to choreograph the fight quite brilliantly.

English

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