Sarah Gabriel

BBC Proms 2020 - lyrics for First Night commission

The BBC Proms 2020 season opened on Friday 17 July on BBC Radio 3 and Sunday 19 July on BBC Four with a unique First Night commission by Iain Farrington, marking the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth.

The opening night mash-up of Beethoven’s nine symphonies by composer, arranger and pianist Iain Farrington included all five BBC orchestras – the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, BBC Concert Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra Of Wales and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra – as well as BBC singers, who sang Sarah Gabriel’s words for ‘Ode to Joy’.

From Ivan Hewitt, The Telegraph:

‘…we were offered something brand-new. The 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth has brought forth a number of musical homages, mostly of an earnest and strenuous kind.

Ian Farrington, the composer of the ten-minute Beethovenia that opened last night’s Prom, perhaps wisely took the view that moral uplift is not what a pandemic-wearied public needs. Instead he offered a jolly romp through all nine symphonies, assembled from little fragments recorded individually by 323 musicians from the five BBC Orchestras and the BBC Singers, and then painstakingly assembled into a musical roller-coaster ride. Right at the end, the Ode to Joy from the 9th Symphony appeared in a reflective, minor-key mode, clothing a newly written text by Sarah Gabriel which meditated on the darkness of our present lives, before turning to quiet hopefulness at the very end.’

Credits

Role Contributor

Producer Kat Mansoor

Director Toby Amies

Composer Iain Farrington

Writer Sarah Gabriel

Orchestra BBC Concert Orchestra

Orchestra BBC National Orchestra of Wales

Orchestra BBC Philharmonic

Orchestra BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Orchestra BBC Symphony Orchestra

Choir BBC Singers

Dancer Emma Farnell-Watson

Dancer Joshua Smith

Following their sell-out performance at the Oxford Playhouse, 2019 brings a further revival at Presteigne Festival of Dorothy Parker Takes a Trip, the one-act solo play commissioned by and premiered at Dartington International Festival.

Devised and co-created by Sarah Gabriel and director Richard Williams, with Iain Farrington as music director, this is a story about legendary writer and wit Dorothy Parker’s immense talent and complicated life, with songs by Harold Arlen, George Gershwin, Rodgers & Hart, Kurt Weill, Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael and others. Also featuring Dorothy Parker’s lawyer’s assistant and a filing cabinet.

Podcast

Here’s a podcast with Sarah Gabriel, Richard Williams and Iain Farrington, telling the story behind the show, prior to their performance at The Oxford Playhouse in 2018.

Produced and edited by Catriona Oliphant from Chrome Radio.

About A House on Middagh Street

A House on Middagh Street, a one-hour musical play, was commissioned by the Britten-Pears Foundation for performance at the Aldeburgh Pump House during the 2018 Aldeburgh Festival. It was Sarah’s writer/director debut. The play will be revived in August at Dartington Festival 2019.

A House on Middagh Street is an immersive performance is set in the house in Brooklyn where Benjamin Britten, WH Auden, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee lived during the Second World War in an extraordinary creative maelstrom, where novels (including Gypsy’s pulp classic, The G-String Murders), operas and poems were written, but the washing up never got done.

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Credits 2018

Premiered at the Pumphouse Aldeburgh, Aldeburgh Festival 2018
Written & directed by Sarah Gabriel
Commissioned and produced by the Britten-Pears Foundation

Benjamin Britten // Thomas Ghaleb

WH Auden // Jonah York

Carson McCullers // Tilly-Mae Millbrook

Gypsy Rose Lee // Emma Waterford

Lucia la Louche // Lucy Walker

Emigrette // Sarah Gabriel

Music by Aaron Copland, George Gershwin and Benjamin Britten

With guest ‘appearances’ by Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Aaron Copland, Igor and Vera Stravinsky, Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill and others

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Photos:

Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten in Brooklyn

The cast of A House on Middagh Street 2018:

Following her sell-out play, ‘A House on Middagh Street’, premiered at the 2018 Aldeburgh Festival, Sarah was commissioned by Britten-Pears Arts to write a new piece exploring the composer Michael Tippett’s experience as an absolutist conscientious objector during the second world war, leading to his brief imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs. Performed at the Aldeburgh Pumphouse as part of the Aldeburgh Festival 2019. The show starred the acclaimed biographer of Michael Tippett, Oliver Soden.

Cast

Michael Tippett // Oliver Soden

Sarah Gabriel // Narrator

Colin Uttley // Actor

Lucy Walker // Actor

Nick Clark // Actor

Ben Vonberg-Clark // Tenor

Laura Roberts // Piano

Ella Roberts // Mezzo-soprano

Frequent collaborators, Sarah Gabriel and Joseph Atkins are developing their new one-act opera, The Trial of Artemisia.

Commissioned for the (postponed) 2020 Aldeburgh Festival, Sarah Gabriel and novelist and classicist Natalie Haynes are creating a new one-hour show, exploring ancient and present muses.