By Charles Hutchinson

SOPRANO Jennifer Coleman will make her York debut in Sunday's York Proms in the Museum Gardens.
Here she answers Charles Hutchinson's questions on the Proms, her X Factor past and opera present.
Do you have any York connections, Jennifer?
“No, though my sister lived there for one year, and I visited her when she was there. I have more connections with Yorkshire. My Mum is from Yorkshire and grew up in Rotherham. I still have family in the county.”
Have you sung previously in the city? If so, where, when and what?
“This will be my first performance in York. In Yorkshire, I’ve previously given a recital in Sheffield St Marie Cathedral. And I have sung at lots of weddings all over the county."
Have you sung at Proms concerts previously? If so, when and where?
"I have. At one memorable occasion, I sang at one in London a few years ago for St George’s Day with the Royal British Legion Band. It was lots of fun.
"But this Proms in York will be different because of performing with the orchestra [the specially formed Yorkshire Festival Orchestra]. I’m really excited to hear the beautiful sound they will make."
What will be your Proms highlights this weekend?
"For me, the highlight of any Prom is always singing the patriotic section at the end, when the audience join in with Land Of Hope And Glory and Jerusalem."
Why are Proms concerts so popular?
"I think the Proms concerts have become part of British culture: a time to celebrate our nationality and feel patriotic. The only other time we get to feel this is once every four years during the football World Cup.
"What’s more British than a glass of Pimm's and a picnic in the British sunshine, with some fresh strawberries, and being serenaded by beautiful music? Heaven!"
What did you learn from your X Factor boot camp at the age of 17?
"I learned through my experience as a teenager on The X Factor that I wanted to be a professional singer when I grew up.
"At that time, I didn’t even listen to classical music or opera, so I had no idea that is what I would later become. It made me practise more every day and made me work really hard to end up where I am now. It made me realise that it was possible to achieve a career in singing."
Describe your experience of singing at the Royal Albert Hall….
"Every stage has its own personality. Some are historic and old and full of charm; some are super-ornate and fancy and maybe even a little pretentious. Some are modern and designed for modern-day audiences.
"But, at the end of the day, I go on and do what I do. It doesn’t matter where I am or what stage I am singing on. When the lights are on, you can’t see anything anyway."
What’s coming up next for you in your singing diary?
"I'm working as a full-time singer with Opera Vlaanderen, Best Opera Company 2019 in the International Opera Awards.
"For the 2019/20 season, we're performing in Verdi's Don Carlos, Verdi's Requiem, Verdi's Macbeth, Dvorak's Rusalka, Schreker's Der Schmied von Gent, Wagner/Verdi's C(h)oeurs 2020, Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutti and Schumann's Faust.
"Next season we'll be performing Macbeth in Gent, and then we'll take the show to Luxembourg for a couple of performances.
"I'm really enjoying performing as one of the witches. It means I get to explore some unusual colours in my voice and I can embody a whole different physicality on stage.
"I also really enjoy travelling as part of my job. I'm so lucky that I've been able to explore so much of the world through my performing career."
Tickets for Sunday's York Proms are on sale at yorkproms.com, on 01904 555670 or in person at the Visit York Visitor Information Centre, Museum Street. Gates open at 5pm; entertainment starts at 5.15pm; main concert, 7.30pm.


​https://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/17758144.jennifer-patriotic-mood-york-proms/

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Wow! - I can't believe it is the final opera this season - opera number 7 with Opera Vlaanderen. It has been a very intense year with some very challenging pieces of music, to learn and perform in very limited time. I am so glad that we are finishing the season with this opera. Verdi's Macbeth is a true masterpiece; and also super fun to perform in. This is a high energy production with lots of movements and physicality. I really feel like I am getting a work out during the witches scenes. During rehearsals, my Fitbit detected that I was doing some kind of "sporting activity". I found that quite amusing because I was just doing my job. In the photo above, I am the witch on the far left, with what looks like a rainbow over my head, the slow exposure really captures the movement of waving these paper streamers (or the Flemish word: Slingers) in the air. I think this shot really shows well the energy that we put into this scene in the 3rd act.

We are only performing Macbeth in Antwerp this time. It will return again later in the year, during next season, for performances in Gent and Luxembourg. Let's hope they don't run out of the fake blood before then! We use so much of it in this production.

Shakespeare's Macbeth is certainly the most demonic of Giuseppe Verdi's works. The focus is on the transient nature of power. We witness how a chain of violence, terror and paranoia is unleashed, fatally and destructively pitting Macbeth, Lady Macbeth and the witches against one another. Following the productions La Forza del Destino and Otello, the German director Michael Thalheimer is thus creating his own Verdi trilogy at Opera Vlaanderen.

After a prophecy, Macbeth falls prey to an unprecedented ambition and thirst for power, encouraged and orchestrated by his wife. But with the power also grows the guilt and this growing awareness leads to insanity. In the context of the 19th-century Italian opera, Macbeth was risky business. Not only did Verdi work from a harrowing play that was little-known in Italy; he also dispensed with the obligatory love story. Especially innovative was his focus on the disturbed minds of both protagonists, whereby drama and music are inseparably bound up with one another.

With the Italian conductor Paolo Carignani – certainly one of the leading maestros in the Italian opera repertoire working today – the musical direction of Macbeth is in the safest of hands. 

Length: 3 hours, incl. one intermission   Italian with Dutch surtitles  

https://operaballet.be/en/programme/2018-2019/macbeth​

I am super proud of my company. Well done to everyone!

Opera Vlaanderen has received the International Opera Award for Best Opera Company.
Opera Vlaanderen was up against some tough competition; Opéra national de Paris, Theater an der Wien, Houston Grand Opera, Deutsche Oper am Rhein and GöteborgOperans were also nominated, but in the end it was Opera Vlaanderen who received the honors. 
Artistic director Aviel Cahn when accepting the award:
"An enormous honor and a recognition of ten years of hard work by everyone at our opera house. On stage, behind the scenes, in the offices and the ateliers. More than anything, this is an award for them. This emphasises yet again that Opera Vlaanderen is part of the international top because we bring opera in exciting and societally relevant ways. I hope this award inspires everyone who - just like us - believes in the future of opera as a genre."

https://operaballet.be/en/the-house/blog/opera-vlaanderen-wins-award-for-best-opera-company

​http://www.operaawards.org/archive/2019/

My first time in Luxembourg. What a very special country! I've been wanting to come and visit some friends here for a while. I'm so thrilled that I got to see them finally.
I loved revising this opera again (4 months after we last performed it). It felt like seeing and old friend. Exactly the same. Like nothing had changed. At first I was a little nervous that I might have forgotten all the words. But as soon as the piano started playing the overture in our first rehearsal it all came back into my mind. Isn't it amazing how the human memory works.

I'm sad to say goodbye to Nurse Jenny. I think this has been my favourite opera that I have had the privilege to be a part of this year.

This was a very unique experience to be a part of. Unlike any opera I have ever performed in before, Les Bienveillantes shines a torch on humanity at it's utter worst. The story is centred around a highly disturbing Nazi Officer during the second world war. The music was based mostly on Bach chorals, but Hector spent time in Auschwitz while composing the piece and I feel that his music was strongly influenced by the time he spent there.
This production brought many challenges to us as performers. One of the main obstacles was the mud that was used to literally flood the stage. It made the floor quite slippery and so you had to be conscious of every move. It also meant that the technical team and costume department would spend hours after every performance cleaning it up again!

They also managed to have a flying grand piano in this production. At first I was terrified to walk underneath the piano - incase it fell. But we soon learned that it was very safely floating above our heads the whole time. It's amazing what our talented technical team can achieve.

A world premiere after Jonathan Littell's controversial novel The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes) from 2006. The main character, SS officer Max Aue, is not only a witness but above all, also a participant in the horrors of war, but he is not burdened by it. After the creation of Infinite Now, about the First World War, Opera Vlaanderen assigned this challenging commission on the Second World War to librettist Händl Klaus and the Catalan composer Hèctor Parra. It will be directed by Calixto Bieito.

The characterisation of Maximilian Aue as a sensitive, culturally refined intellectual, but also as a psychologically traumatised, homosexual Nazi, creates an uncomfortably ambiguous situation. The adaptation of this novel as an opera is a true tour de force. With Les Bienveillantes, the composer Hèctor Parra has written his sixth major work for music theatre. He combines strong musical structures with a highly intuitive and direct dramatic tone.

For Les Bienveillantes, Opera Vlaanderen is putting together a cast of opera singers with a strong stage presence. The director and guiding spirit of Les Bienveillantes is Calixto Bieito, who has lost none of the radicalism that established him as the enfant terrible of the opera scene in his early years. The musical direction will be in the hands of Peter Rundel, a specialist in contemporary music who also previously directed Hèctor Parra's Wilde at the Schwetzinger Festspiele.

Length: 3 hours 30 minutes, incl. one intermission   German with Dutch and English surtitles

https://operaballet.be/en/programme/2018-2019/les-bienveillantes

There is still time to watch our production of La Juive on OperaVision- Or just watch the first half an hour (Act 1) to get a jist of it and to hear our wonderful chorus:

https://operavision.eu/en/library/performances/operas/la-juive?fbclid=IwAR02EO27KbT4iFZ-xsjZUqZni1jLxdfTMjxsl54kYG3TXAcszIaUX-PFnfw​

I thoroughly enjoyed singing in this production. It won several awards a few years ago when Opera Vlaanderen first performed it. I am not surprised that they decided to bring it back, everyone that I worked with was very fond of this show. The story is compelling, the music is delightful and the staging was quite fun too. The cast were given different colour hands depending on whether they were portraying Christian (blue) or Jews (yellow). This was the only part of the production that I found frustrating - no they weren't gloves, but makeup painted onto our hands. The hand makeup was very inconvenient if you needed to go to the toilet during the interval for example. It also meant that everything I touched was always left with a blue fingerprint on it. The things we do for our profession...

Created in 1835, Fromental Halévy's La Juive was controversial from the start. For some, it was an insult to the religion and the state, for others it was a plea for understanding. Above all, it is a human tragedy of a Jewish father and his daughter. It instantly became one of the greatest opera successes of the first half of the 19th century until the work was banned by the Nazis.

With his grand opéra La Juive, Halévy composed a masterpiece which, in the first 50 years after the première, was performed 500 times in Paris alone. This archetype of the genre became a milestone in European opera history not only for its content, but also for its grand staging and forceful impact. Until the work vanished from the stage under the rule of the Nazi regime.

Director Peter Konwitschny turned La Juive into a powerful performance, without conventional dramatic or musical concessions. The pressure of society which, under the influence of religious fanaticism, leads to a fatal destruction of love, was thus clearly laid bare. The production received the prestigious FAUST prize as best performance of the 2014-2015 opera season and was showered with international praise. This reprise of La Juive will feature a completely new cast in the principal roles, including, as leading man, the tenor Roy Cornelius Smith. 

Length: 3 hours 15 minutes, incl. one intermission   French with Dutch surtitles 

https://operaballet.be/en/programme/2018-2019/la-juive

Today is our final performance of Cardillac. This is quite a spooky murder story with music that is both highly romantic and lyrical, and at the same time dramatic and angular. The production has been set in the 1920s. The set and many of the costumes are all in Black and White. The designers have clearly been inspired by film noir. I love the coat that I get to wear, with it's fur collar and cuffs: it makes me feel like a diva! However, the makeup is a little on the scary side for my taste, but it works very well on stage in the context of the opera. It makes the chorus look unidentifiable as individuals, and more like duplicates of the same person. I find it very funny when I am in the wings of the theatre in the dark, and I can never quite tell which of my colleagues I am standing next to!

"Cardillac from 1926 is as gripping as a spine tingling whodunnit, at the same time as offering a nod to the contemporary world of Antwerp jewellers. The libretto, based on an early crime novella by E.T.A. Hoffmann, tells a timeless story. Hindemith's austere music is exceptionally to-the-point and perfectly captures the dramatic situation. A diamond in the rough in the hands of director Guy Joosten.

Hindemith's first major opera Cardillac (1926) takes its material from Das Fraulein von Scuderi by E.T.A. Hoffmann. A modern metropolis is plagued by mysterious crimes – unsolved murders have the people terrified and the authorities resort to drastic measures. It is against this backdrop that the story of the jeweller Cardillac unfolds. He cannot abandon his art and becomes a murderer. 

For this production of Cardillac, Opera Vlaanderen invited Guy Joosten, who previously demonstrated his affinity for early 20th-century operas in 2009 with Wozzeck. 
The former principal conductor Dmitri Jurowski, who confirmed his mastery of the genre in this work, will be musical director for Cardillac.
In Cardillac, the leading role will be performed by the British baritone Simon Neal, who previously dazzled in Calixto Bieito's production of Mahagonny.

Length: 1 uur 40 min, no intermission   German with Dutch surtitles"

https://operaballet.be/en/programme/2018-2019/cardillac