Noye's Fludde

As a new collaborative production of Britten's one-act opera Noye's Fludde hits the stage in Leeds and Manchester this week, Tom Service speaks to staff and children from the Ingram Road Primary School during rehearsals in Holbeck to learn about the resonances of this Biblical story in today’s world and why it’s important for their community to be doing a project of such scale. He talks to Slung Low theatre company’s Artistic Director, Alan Lane, and the conductor Nicholas Chalmers, to learn how they’ve put community of 180 children at the heart of this show.

Tom joins Kitty Ross, curator at Leeds Museums, to hear about the venue’s role at the heart of the city’s former Triennial Music Festival, and how it played host to the premieres of ambitious works including oratorios as famous as Walton’s Belshazzar's Feast, as well as a work which has since fallen into obscurity - Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s The Blind Girl of Castél-Cuillé. She reflects on the relative health of Leeds’ musical ecosystem and a recently rediscovered trove of forgotten works by the city’s female composers.

Tom talks to the editors of a new book ‘Popular Music in Leeds: histories, heritage, people and place’, Paul Thompson and Brett Lashua. He drops by the city’s Sela Bar, the current incarnation of the ‘Studio 20’ jazz club where Sarah Vaughan sang and George Melly signed his name, to discuss Leeds’ place in, and contribution to, the UK’s popular music scene.

And with a new production of the folk opera Anoush about to open at Marylebone Theatre, in London, conductor Aris Nadirian and director Seta White tell Tom why Armen Tigranian’s opera is rarely heard outside Armenia. The scholar Knar Abrahamyan explores how the work’s music has percolated into popular culture, how the piece was viewed in Soviet times, and why it still enjoys such popularity in its home country.