Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Glyndebourne Festival Opera is an annual opera festival held at Glyndebourne, an English country house near Lewes, in East Sussex, England.

History

Under the supervision of the Christie family, the festival has been held annually since 1934, except in 1941–45 during World War II and 1993 when the theatre was being rebuilt, for a 1994 reopening. Gus Christie, son of Sir George Christie and grandson of festival founder John Christie, became festival chairman in 2000.

Since the company's inception, Glyndebourne has been particularly celebrated for its productions of Mozart operas. Recordings of Glyndebourne's past historic Mozart productions have been reissued. Other notable productions included their 1980s production of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, directed by Trevor Nunn, and later expanded from the Glyndebourne stage and videotaped in 1993 for television, with Nunn again directing. While Mozart operas have continued to be the mainstay of its repertory, the company has expanded it with productions of Janáček and Handel operas.

Glyndebourne

Coordinates: 50°52′42″N 0°03′50″E / 50.87833°N 0.06389°E / 50.87833; 0.06389

Glyndebourne (/ˈɡlaɪndbɔːn/) is an English country house, the site of an opera house that, since 1934, has been the venue for the annual Glyndebourne Festival Opera. Initially, operas were presented within the house but there is now a free-standing opera house on its grounds. The house itself, located near Lewes in East Sussex, England, is thought to be about six hundred years old.

History of the house

"There had been a manor house at Glynde Bourne (as it was often spelt) since the fifteenth century", but the exact age of the house is unknown. Some surviving timber framing and pre-Elizabethan panelling makes an early sixteenth-century date the most likely. In 1618, it came into the possession of the Hay family, passing to James Hay Langham in 1824. He inherited his father's baronetcy and estate in Northamptonshire in 1833 which under the terms of his inheritance should have led to him relinquishing Glyndebourne, but as a certified lunatic he was unable to do so. After litigation the estate passed to a relative, Mr Langham Christie, but he later had to pay £50,000 to persuade another relative to withdraw a rival claim.

Glyndebourne (record label)

The Glyndebourne Label is a UK-based record label founded in 2006 to release live recordings of Glyndebourne Festival Opera performances.

Releases on The Glyndebourne Label draw on archival recordings from 1960 to the present day and are released in pairs with one recording from the original opera house and one from the new opera house on the same site which opened in 1994. The label released its first two recordings, Betrothal in a Monastery and Le nozze di Figaro, in 2008.

Since the establishment of the label in 2008, the releases on The Glyndebourne Label draw on the extensive recordings in the archive, which span the years from 1960 to the present day. The recordings were originally made for posterity by the late John Barnes. These recordings are released in pairs, with one recording from the old opera house and one from the new, which opened in 1994. All releases on the Glyndebourne Label are from live performances, resulting in vividly realistic recordings. They are packaged as a hard bound book containing a libretto in English, French and German along with a feature article and a synopsis.