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Meet Emily Howard Cobley, Mezzo Soprano

Emily Cobley (nee Howard) has sung and recorded works by many composers; among them Steven Gerber, Kevin Malone, Michael Rose, Peter Susser and Alexandra Vrebalov. Most recently in 2012, she sang the American and British premieres of Kevin Malone’s A Clockwork Operetta with members of the Kronos Quartet (American premiere at the PEN American World Voices Festival) Of her PEN performance, Jane Ciabattari of NPR said (Emily) “blew the roof off” she was-appropriately-raucous, raspy and spell binding”. Other singing highlights include working as a Valkyrie at the Metropolitan Opera, her debut at Carnegie Hall in Mozart's Mass in C Minor, a performance of the Laudamus Te from the same work for Bill and Hillary Clinton and singing excerpts from for thousands as “The Queen of Opera” in the Extremely Hungary Festival's Opera Night in 2009 (as part of Target First Fridays at the Brooklyn Museum). Favourite roles performed include Azucena in Il Trovatore, Amneris in Aida and Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd.

Meet Steven Griffin, Baritone

Steven Griffin’s performances range from bass soloist with the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra in Haydn’s Seven Last Words to principal roles including La Fauteuil and L’Arbre in Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, David in Barber’s A Hand of Bridge and Cameriere in Ward’s Roman Fever. Recent performances include the bass soloist in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio,  performed with members of the Bergen Philharmonic and the Collegium Musicum choir. 

Steven has participated in a number of young artists programs including Opera NUOVA, where he sang the role Melisso in Handel’s Alcina, Halifax Summer Opera Workshop, where he performed the role of Starveling in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and the Center for Opera Studies in Italy (COSI) where he performed the role of Publio in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito.

Steven is originally from the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia where received his Bachelor of Music degree in Voice Performance from Memorial University of Newfoundland .He is currently studying for his Master of Music with Quentin Hayes at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) in Manchester, UK.
 

Meet Tim Langston, Tenor

British tenor Timothy Langston read Music at the University of Manchester where he studied voice under Andrew Heggie. He achieved First Class Honors and was awarded Proctor Gregg Fund awards for Composition and Recital.  In September 2012 he began his studies on the MMus course at the Royal Northern College of Music, studying with Peter Alexander Wilson. At the end of his first year he was awarded the Anne Ziegler Award by the RNCM.  

Timothy is an enthusiastic performer and director of opera. He has sung roles in Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg Act 3 (Zorn) with the Halle/Sir Mark Elder, Il Ritorno d’Ulisse (Eumete/Ulisse), In March 2013 sang with the European Opera Centre in A Beggar’s Opera (Wat Dreary) with Richard Farnes and the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

Timothy’s concert experience includes performances with Halle, Psappha, The Gabrieli Consort, Gewandhaus Orchestra, Simon Bolivar Orchestra, Birmingham Festival Orchestra, Constella Orchestra and the Anthony Burgess Foundation. Timothy appeared on the Halle recording of Elgar’s The Apostles, which won the BBC Music Magazine Recording of the Year and the Gramaphone Award for Best Choral Recording in 2013.

Introducing Emily Mowbray, Mezzo Soprano

Emily Mowbray, Mezzo Soprano

Born in Nottingham, England, Emily attended a specialist school for music where she was awarded the Elizabeth Nall Music Prize. She continued her vocal studies at the University of York with Lynne Dawson and graduated with a BA (Hons) in 2011. She is currently training at the Royal Northern College of Music with Nicholas Powell after receiving the Dame Isobel Baillie Performance Award for Vocal and Opera Studies. She performed in the UK première of Narcisus & Echo by Djordjevic in 2011 and performs in numerous solo recitals with a variety of repertoire. She recently performed in the Leeds Lieder Festival with a new piece 'Forgotten Memory' (2013) by Katie Chatburn. With the same composer she also worked on a collaboration to win the Rosamund Prize in 2013.  She has performed many new works in both the RNCM Concert Hall and the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall and in Contemporary Music Festivals by composers such as James Whittle and Nelson Bohorquez Castro. Emily also has a strong interest in Latin American and Spanish song, including art song, Argentine tango music and the traditional pasillo.

It's growing

Ha ha cast cast and music coming in. New people joining the team and all taking shape. Looking good looking good looking good lucky cat!

Interview with Emily Howard, MOP Artistic Director

Charlotte & Grace
Q. Where did the idea for the MOP opera project come from?
 
Emily
A. It came from noticing a need.  I am a singer and have had quite a few close associations with current composers.  Except for a very lucky few, most composers are forced to work in a lonely vacuum because there aren’t enough opportunities to hear their pieces performed.  With opera and vocal work, this becomes a particular problem, because the composer really needs to hear and see these kinds of works at least partially on their feet in order to make final decisions.  Anything to do with voice or drama is going to alter pretty radically from page to performance.  I wanted to create some sort of organisation where composers could actually hear chunks of an opera performed as they are being developed.  And I also wanted to produce whole versions of shorter vocal works, so that we get some full productions that hopefully are portable enough to take to festivals.  This is partially the goal with Mysterious 44.
 
Charlotte & Grace
Q. What exactly is mop opera project?
 
Emily
A. MOP is an organisation currently in its baby stages, but the larger vision is to create something as described above.  There is a wonderful organisation in Brooklyn, NY called American Opera Projects that does something similar to what I am envisioning.  They have a roster of composers who are working on very interesting operas and they help them develop them over a number of years.  They also present scenes from the operas at regular intervals to an enthusiastic committed audience base.  I’m taking inspiration from what they do and taking it even a bit further by committing to commissioning and producing some shorter works. This year, MOP is launching itself with a full production of Mysterious 44, which is a short, chamber opera for 4 singers with an electronic backing.  Next year, I want to begin with the presentation of scenes of larger, developing works while also commissioning and presenting another shorter work. And we’ll take it from there! We are currently building a roster of interested composers and singers.  And of course, we are hoping to build a massive audience base.
 
Charlotte & Grace
Q. Have you been involved in a similar production before?
 
Emily
A. I have.  First of all, I have sung hundreds of new pieces and have worked closely with certain composers for years so I have a good idea of how to work with and help composers. Secondly, I was the director of Ensemble Youkali in New York, which was an organisation dedicated to presenting opera and vocal works in unconventional formats and staging.  We did a version of the Rake’s Progress that was set in a series of five installations created for the production by NY and Boston based artists.  We had a bead garden, a pop up house, a cemetery made of cards, a stained glass bordello installation and a wonderful installation of this gorgeous cracked door with projected light that represented the asylum.   These were the various scenes in the opera and the players travelled around to them while the audience sat cabaret style in the middle. It turned out to be very effective.  We also did a cabaret piece for four singers, that was a series of orchestrated arts song, that we arranged purely by key.  This is in turn formed its own narrative, so we made a set and took it from there and added Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes in between sets of songs as sort of a commentary.  I would love to try some similar ideas with MOP in our full productions of short works.  For example, Mysterious 44 will feature an installation by Onome Ekeh, a New York based video artist.  I think it is important and also serious fun to incorporate as much new artistic media as is possible with every new presentation.  I love playing matchmaker with artists in different media.   Kevin Malone and Onome Ekeh and I already worked on a presentation of Kevin’s piece A Clockwork Operetta, which we presented at the PEN International Voices Festival in New York in 2012.

Charlotte & Grace
Q. What kind of legacy would you like MOP to leave?
 
Emily
A. I really want MOP to turn into a creative opera lab where new musical ideas, technological ideas and dramatic themes can be patiently developed.  And I very much want MOP to turn into an organisational resource for the UK composer community. And Manchester is the place to do it! Manchester is already such a fantastic city for composition; there is a very rich new music community here.  I want to put a little focus specifically on the development of new opera within this existing community.   I also want to create a space where composers and audience can interact freely.  I want an intelligent, excited audience to be a crucial part of the development of the new pieces.  Lastly, I hope that it can be a resource for larger UK and international opera companies to come and see some the larger developing operas as they are being presented, so that they can find operas that they might be interested in producing themselves.
 
Charlotte & Grace
Q. We are singers, is there any way we could get involved, in the future, in mop opera project?
 
Emily
A. Absolutely!  Just contact us through the website.  We are looking to build a roster of interested singers so we want to hear everybody.  Even if we don’t have an opera that is suitable for your voice or type at the moment, we certainly might in the future.




Charlotte Dyce & Grace Gladston and students at Manchester University and are working as interns at MOP