The Lighthouse newspaper clippings: Leeds Mercury

Leeds Mercury, Saturday 29 December 1900

Intern on the Inside: Towards an Unknown Port

This is an exciting term for the year 5s at St Mary’s and St John’s Primary School in Barnet. They are one of the lucky groups singing alongside ETO in their Autumn tour. In 3 weeks’ time they will be on stage at the Royal Opera House, Linbury Studio Theatre, and today rehearsals are getting […]

Paula Sides on The Emperor of Atlantis

Soprano Paula Sides is one of English Touring Opera’s most recognisable faces, having worked with the company on no less than six productions since 2009, including The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro and Xerxes. She now plays Bubikopf in ETO’s Autumn 2012 production The Emperor of Atlantis, which she is finding one of the […]

No Red Herrings: choosing the May Queen

Act 1, Scene 1, and the question on everybody’s lips in Albert Herring is who should be May Queen. The scene is effectively a committee meeting, a means to an end, lacking much physical stage drama. I was slightly disappointed: I had wanted to take some photographs of dramatic facial expressions, I had wanted to […]

Intern on the Inside: Dancing under the Scaffold

In June 1940 the Gestapo took control of Terezín, an abandoned fort in the Czech Republic. By the end of November it had been turned into a ghetto, holding hundreds of thousands of Jews. Those who survived its horrendous conditions waited there to be transported to their deaths at Auschwitz and Treblinka extermination camps. Two […]

The survivor’s path

Auschwitz survivor Otto Grunfeld talks to Lesley Millet on Radio JCOM about his memories of composer Viktor Ullmann, who gave him music lessons when they were both imprisoned in the Terezín concentration camp. Otto was also joined in this interview by Dr David Fligg from Leeds College of Music and by ETO’s General Director James […]

Albert Herring rehearsals, week one

Photos by @VerityBramson