Conductor – Harry Sever
Repetiteur – Edmund Whitehead
Director – Michael Burden

15 and 16 February 2013, 8.30pm
New College Ante-Chapel

Tickets: £12 / £6 concessions
at www.galileoinoxford.co.uk
or on the door

Philip Glass’s chamber opera, Galileo Galilei, is an essay on the life of the Italian scientist, philosopher, astronomer, and author of the texts A dialogue concerning the two chief world systems and Two new sciences. The opera’s libretto is based on excerpts of letters of Galileo and his family, including his daughter, Maria Celesta, and is constructed as a one act set of scenes. Dramatically, the opera works backwards. It opens with Galileo as an old, blind, man, under house arrest, and works in reverse order through his trial and inquisition for heresy; his break with the Church; his own struggle of belief in both religion and science; and the nature of his writings. The opera ends with the young Galileo watching an opera composed by his father, Vincenzo, who was a member of the Florentine Camerata. The subject of his father’s opera is the motions of celestial bodies, a theme which completes the cyclic nature of the opera already established by the backwards-moving plot. Other operas by Philip Glass include the trilogy, Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten, and The Fall of the House of Usher, performed by NCO in 2008. His output also includes dance music, symphonies, concertos and chamber music. Photo credit: Steve Pyke

Cast
Sagredo - Johanna Harrison
Duchess – Christina Aileen Thomson
Marie Celeste - Esther Mallett
Eos - Gessica Howarth
Marie de’ Medici – Johanna Harrison
Maria Magdelena – Tara Mansfield
Oracle 1 - Tara  Mansfield
Cardinal 1 – Rose  Rands
Scribe – Edward Edgcumbe
Old Galileo - Nick Pritchard
Young Galileo - David Le Prevost
Pope Urban VIII - Daniel Tate
Cardinal Barberini - Daniel Tate
Oracle 2 – Samuel Poppleton
Cardinal 2 - William Pate
Salviati – Michael Hickman
Cardinal 3 - Michael Hickman
Priest – Samuel Poppleton
Father - Milo Comerford
Simplico – Ashley Francis-Roy