Photo by Gordon Scammell
May 22, 2022
The Guggenheim
Holy Ground
Works & Process. The performing arts series at the Guggenheim will present the Glimmerglass Festival New Works, featuring composer Damien Geter and librettist Lila Palmer's Holy Ground. This opera begins in a dystopian version of the present, in which the Messiah has not yet appeared. Can a rookie angel persuade a modern girl to take on the task, staving off the apocalypse?
New York City • USA
June 12, 2022
Cecilia Concerts
This Be Her Verse
Canadian Premiere. A smart, ground-breaking exploration of female experience, This Be Her Verse is curated by South African soprano Golda Schultz and pianist Jonathan Ware on an internationally touring concert program featuring numbers from her acclaimed Alpha Classics record. Featuring a powerhouse program of all-female composers including works by Clara Schumann, Emilie Mayer, Rebecca Clarke, and Nadia Boulanger, Schultz moves a step beyond the vogue for ‘discovering’ underrepresented female composers and presents a personally commissioned song cycle from South African composer Kathleen Tagg and librettist Lila Palmer which boldly addresses the gender imbalance in classical music, in words witty, barbed, tender and true.
Halifax • Canada
June 14, 2022
Vancouver Recital Society
This Be Her Verse
Personally commissioned by soprano Golda Schultz, this song cycle from South African composer Kathleen Tagg and librettist Lila Palmer boldly addresses the gender imbalance in classical music, in words witty, barbed, tender and true.
Vancouver • Canada
July 9-10, 2022
Gran Teatre del Liceu
The Fox Sisters
World Premiere. An opera about the rebellious sisters who founded and then tried to destroy the Spiritualist movement, The Fox Sisters tackles questions of class, celebrity, female agency and exploitation through the massive explosion in attempts to bridge the gap between living and dead in late nineteenth-century North America and Europe; with an evocative, theatrical score by Argento Opera prize winner Marc Migó.
Barcelona • Spain
July 15, 2022
Festival d'Aix-en-Provence
This Be Her Verse
French Premiere. Personally commissioned by soprano Golda Schultz, this song cycle from South African composer Kathleen Tagg and librettist Lila Palmer boldly addresses the gender imbalance in classical music, in words witty, barbed, tender and true.
Aix-en-Provence • France
July 17, 2022
Liverpool Philharmonic
In Her Own Valley
World Premiere. In this world premiere of a staged oratorio inspired by the life and work of Hannah Lightbody, Grace-Evangeline Mason (BBC Proms, Rushworth Prize) and Lila Palmer celebrate the successes of the great 18th-century female campaigner for the welfare and education of working-class children while asking whether Hannah’s economic relationship to the international slave trade make her a figure to celebrate or deplore.
Liverpool • England
July 20-23, 2022
Des Moines Metro Opera
American Apollo
World Premiere. A black model seeking opportunity with persecution at his heels, a celebrity portrait artist in search of authentic inspiration, and a powerful female patron form the potent triangular relationship at the heart of this new opera from Damien Geter and Lila Palmer. Can love transcend the barriers of power, class, race and gender, and can art ever elevate the model to anything more than a tool? The relationship between the famous portraitist John Singer Sargent and his most significant model forms the subject of this simmering exploration of love, erasure, and art, inspired by Sargent’s only uncommissioned monumental male nude, with pioneering partnership from the Gardner Museum, Boston.
Des Moines • USA
July 29 – August 20, 2022
Glimmerglass Festival
Holy Ground
World Premiere. Part angelic office comedy, part dystopian Messiah tale, this anarchic exploration from Geter and Palmer tracks a familiar story with a new twist: a Messiah is due to save the world, but human women seem uninterested in taking part. Can heaven persuade the right girl to sign up, and should they even have to convince her? Holy Ground is that strange beast, a gut punch comedy with a loving hand that refuses easy answers, reilluminating the only experience to which the entire human race has a relationship: motherhood.
Cooperstown • USA
August 17, 2022
Edinburgh International Festival
This Be Her Verse
UK Premiere. Personally commissioned by soprano Golda Schultz, this song cycle from South African composer Kathleen Tagg and librettist Lila Palmer boldly addresses the gender imbalance in classical music, in words witty, barbed, tender and true.
Edinburgh • Scotland
September 4, 2022
Lucerne Festival
This Be Her Verse
Swiss Premiere. Golda Schultz is an artist who thinks outside the box of her own discipline. This song recital, which she has dedicated exclusively to women composers, is also a statement. Clara Schumann and Emilie Mayer are two German Romantics on the bill, one a celebrity since her own time, the other all but forgotten. The British Rebecca Clarke and the French Nadia Boulanger represent early Modernism, while Kathleen Tagg, who was born in 1977, comes from South Africa.
Lucerne • Switzerland