The English actor and humorist Stephen Fry translated the German libretto into colloquial English and supplied pertinent new dialogue. The cast is attractive. Young characters are played by young singers. Branagh has a deft touch with Mozartean contrasts between magic and realism. Half fairy tale, half war drama, visually, this "Flute" is exuberant.’
Kenneth Branagh’s film of The Magic Flute has been signed by Regent Releasing for screening in the United States. The film, which was funded by the PMF, to bring opera to new audiences, received its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2006, and its UK premiere in November 2007.

Details of the US premiere, planned for later this year, will be posted on Regent Releasing's web site.

The Los Angeles Times

‘Branagh's "Flute" is a joy. Nothing about the production is marginal. Branagh's "Flute" fascinatingly re-imagines Mozart's opera. All the music is intact and excellently conducted by James Conlon, music director of Los Angeles Opera.
Opera
Cheryl Barker's soprano territory is the serious lyric bordering upon the dramatic. Each of these strong - minded, hard- tried women is distinctively delineated with unstinting conviction.’
31 July 2010
Ricci's Corrado d'Altamura
The sixth opera in the Essential Opera Rara series with Dimitra Theodossiou, Dmitry Korchak and James Westman in the main roles, and the Philharmonia conducted by Roland Boer.
Donizetti's Parisina
with Carmen Giannattasio, José Bros, Dario Solari, Nicola Ulivieri and Ann Taylor with the Geoffrey Mitchell Choir and the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by David Parry.
The Guardian
'Opera Rara are not about to exhaust the canon of their favourite composer, Donizetti. Even so, their regular revivals of his more obscure works do not often turn up something as good as Parisina, presented under David Parry's stylish baton in this concert performance... It was Donizetti's favourite among his operas. This performance showed why.'
The Compton Verney Collections are continually growing and changing. New acquisitions are for the Northern European collection:

Pieter Huys:
The Descent into Limbo, shown on the right, and

Galeazzo Mondella, called Moderno:
Hercules overcoming Antaeus, bronze plaquette, shown below.
The Chinese Collection was augmented by 5 new pieces in March 2009 and then in October 2009, 5 mirrors were bought. These are small hand mirrors, status symbols of the privileged classes, first produced in around 2000 BC, and ranging in size from 13.7 - 15.9 cms.

Dame Jessica Rawson, Professor of Art and Archeology at Oxford University, has illuminatingly re-arranged the display which also includes two incense burners dating from around 206 BC - AD 220 and three wine vessels dating from 1050 - 221 BC.

This fine collection has now been recognised as a collection of national importance.
Updated and reprinted as a paperback, John Lucas’s superb biography of Goodall has been newly published as The Genius of Valhalla, using the title of a successful event in November 2008 at The Coliseum to celebrate the great Wagnerian conductor, Reginald Goodall.

Following the Chandos Opera in English issue of the acclaimed 1968 BBC recording of Wagner’s Mastersingers conducted by Reginald Goodall, Peter Moores Foundation decided to produce this event, where it became obvious that the John Lucas biography was held in high regard, not least by the panel and the Chairman, Humphrey Burton, who ended the panel discussion by saying:

‘These are the last lines of this wonderful biography:
“He spent much of the time listening to tapes of the Bayreuth Ring on a pair of headphones he’d been given...” Annie Evans went down to see him just before he died and he said to her, ““I’d like to have one last go at The Ring dear. I never got bits of it right. It’s the work of a lifetime.”
That night while listening to Götterdämmerung he drifted into a coma and never came out of it.”

I commend the book to you.’
The Opera Group opened their 2010 tour, with their newly developed production The Lion’s Face by poet Glyn Maxwell and composer Elena Langer, at the Brighton Festival. It continues to Oxford, Newcastle and Watford. In July they will appear at the Cardiff Ageing and Dementia Conference, the Cheltenham Festival and the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House.
Peter Moores Foundation has endowed a junior fellowship in Chinese archeology at Merton College, Oxford. It is planned that off-site work will take place at Compton Verney where there is a Chinese collection which has been recognised as a collection of national importance.

Professor Dame Jessica Rawson, DBE, DLitt, FBA, Warden of the College said,
‘An exciting innovation for Oxford and for Merton.’
In 2004 Peter Moores Foundation enabled the recording of Dove's Flight so that a wider audience could enjoy this new work. And that initiative has been continued: with Benjamin's Into the Little Hill, Maconchy's The Sofa and The Departure and Rushton's The Shops. These well-regarded four recordings persuaded us that we ought to publish a new section under Opera recordings called New Work. Perfectly justified as recently Ades's The Tempest and MacMillan's The Sacrifice have been added to the list.
Peter Moores Foundation has supported The Opera Group regularly since 2006 when it produced Jonathan Dove’s The Enchanted Pig.

The Guardian

‘... this is a show that proves opera, at its best, is a source of magic and enchantment.’

Enchanting enough for the production to be transferred to the New Victory Theater in Times Square, New York:

The New York Times

‘Mr. Dove’s music deftly mixes tenderly lyrical flights, jaunty tunes, waltzing duets, song-and-dance numbers and elaborate ensembles... the music is skillfully written and personal. Mr. Dove does not play down to young listeners. The entire score is sung...

The work is imaginatively orchestrated for a small ensemble, with striking and subtle touches for percussion, accordion and harp. Brad Cohen is the assured conductor. The director, John Fulljames, makes clever use of Dick Bird’s rotating set and stylized, sometimes sci-fi costumes. The opera wins you over.’
EMI Classics in association with BBC Radio 3 recorded it at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 2007 and Peter Moores Foundation supported the release of the recording in June 2009.

The Guardian - CD of the week

'Many of the outstanding cast created their roles in the original 2004 staging, including baritone Simon Keenlyside as a noble, perplexed Prospero, tenor Ian Bostridge as the strange, wretched Caliban and Cyndia Sieden as Ariel, leaping to her stratospheric high notes with ethereal agility. The flourishes and ornaments in the vocal writing have the feel of Monteverdi through a prism of modernity.'
In February and March 2009, The Opera Group toured with George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill and Harrison Birtwistle's Down by the Greenwood Side.

Into the Little Hill won the RPS 2009 award for Large-Scale Composition:

‘The jury was impressed by the sheer skill with which the composer has created a work of immense expressive power, inventiveness, drama and beauty, of a stature way beyond the sum of its physical and temporal parts. With Into the Little Hill George Benjamin has provided music theatre with a work for our time.’

The Daily Telegraph
'When I first heard George Benjamin's one-act opera Into the Little Hill two years ago, I tentatively suggested that it might be a masterpiece – not a word to be trifled with. A second hearing, in a superb performance by the Opera Group authoritatively conducted by the composer, confirms my judgment that this is something quite exceptional, both in the originality of its form and the depth of its inspiration.'
Opera North’s production of Verdi’s Don Carlos in the Spring of 2009 was received extremely enthusiastically and recorded for the Opera in English series. The CD features Julian Gavin, Janice Watson, Alastair Miles, William Dazeley, Jane Dutton and John Tomlinson.
The Times
'(Richard Farnes) has already proven his Verdian credentials, but this is possibly his finest achievement yet: Verdi's questing search for humanity matched by playing of sometimes shockingly intimate tenderness. Distill the epic into the personal and you have the elusive essence of Verdi: both on stage and in the pit, this show is dripping with it.’
Rossini's Ermione

The Daily Telegraph
review of the concert held after the recording sessions
'Carmen Giannattasio declaimed exalted emotions with Magnani-like passion, confirming my view that she the most talented of the younger Italian sopranos. Patricia Bardon provided a strong match as her rival Andromaca.
Four tenors confronted these two formidable ladies. Bulent Bezduz and Loic Felix both shone as the Prince's friends, and Paul Nilon did a noble job in the taxing role of Pirro. But it was Colin Lee as Oreste who stole the show with some brilliant pyrotechnics: I'm not sure that Juan Diego Florez could have fired them off better.'
Gramophone Editor’s Choice
‘All essentials for a good recital are here: the featured artist in good voice, imagination capable of bringing 13 different characters to life unseen, apt recording decisions and on-the-pace accompaniment'
Peter Moores Foundation has supported Njabulo Madlala since 2003 while he was studying at the Guildhall School of Music. He comes from Inanda township outside Durban in South Africa, where he always dreamt that his voice would be “my passport to the world”

The Times

‘That moment of rapt silence and attention, when an audience is entirely transfixed by a musician’s artistry, is rare at the best of times – let alone in the middle of a competition. But it happened in the finals of this year’s Kathleen Ferrier Awards, when the South African baritone, Njabulo Madlala, riveted every listener in the hall with his musical storytelling in Schumann’s dramatic ballad, Belsazar.

The 28-year old’s imagination created a gripping and growing sense of menace; and when he cried “Ich bin der Konig von Babylon”, the walls of the Wigmore Hall shook with terror. He would have taken first prize for this alone. But there was more. Madlala was equally at home in Butterworth’s Bredon Hill and in an aria from Bellini’s I Puritani that revealed the rich velvet plush of his fearless voice, its inner warmth and its flexibility. ‘
Behind an impressive 1901 terracotta façade in the seaside town of Llandudno is Wales’ leading gallery of contemporary art, Mostyn. It has recently completed an expansion in which old and new buildings were integrated in a design by architect, Dominic Williams.

Peter Moores Foundation has supported the main reopening show, We Have The Mirrors, We Have The Plans which includes work from twenty-five artists and artist partnerships. The exhibition provides an extensive picture of contemporary art practice in Wales and expresses a broad range of current concerns. The title comes from a text by Craig Wood,

"Does art reflect society? Is what art is today what society does tomorrow? Beware... We are the artists; we have the mirrors, we have the plans."
Full of surreal pastiches, nightmarish scurrying, frightening eruptions, eerie treble voices and disorientating timbres, it is a highly impressive attempt (admirably conducted by Nicholas Collon) to express in aural terms the turmoil inside a mind that has become permanently unhinged from rational thought, or indeed from its own sense of self.'

The Daily Telegraph

'... there's a fundamental honesty about the piece and an absence of sentimentality or melodrama which commands respect.'
The Times

Clearly an opera about dementia isn’t going to be a romp. But I was far more charmed and entertained by the Opera Group’s latest premiere than I expected to be. And touched as well. In its gentle, understated and small-scale way — just six in the cast and twelve in the pit — The Lion’s Face finds a way of saying something profound and moving about the condition in which so many of us will spend our final years... Hill’s extraordinary performance is confined to abrupt shards of fragmented speech. The rest of the cast sing a disturbingly vivid score by the young London-based Russian composer Elena Langer.
Compton Verney’s collection of paintings from Naples includes four paintings of Vesuvius erupting, one example, seen below, by Pierre Jacques Volaire, An eruption of Vesuvius by Moonlight, is based on an actual eruption in 1774. This exhibition ranges from early engravings to an explosive series of paintings by Joseph Wright, J M W Turner and Andy Warhol.

The Daily Telegraph

'Nothing captures eruptions better than art, says the curator of a pyroclastic new show, James Hamilton. (He continues,) "Compton Verney’s collection includes a superb selection of Neapolitan paintings. Central among these are a fiery pair of works whose subject is the erupting Mount Vesuvius, by the French crown-prince of 18th-century volcano painting, Pierre-Jacques Volaire. Building on these, we will open a show that celebrates the artistic outpourings which volcanic eruptions have triggered over the past five centuries.
Janet Baker sang the title role in Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea with Sadler's Wells Opera (now Eglish National Opera) in 1971. A BBC broadcast forms the basis for this recording.
Peter Moores Foundation and the Elton John AIDS Foundation is supporting the Sussex Beacon's Mindful Living Course, which deals with helping those people living with HIV cope with anxiety, depression or chronic pain.

The facilitator of the course said,
“I think the way the course is structured allows people to learn from each others’ experience – their difficulties, their problems, and how they deal with them. The more you practise, the more benefits you will have. The rewards can be manifold.”
The Guardian
‘... this is one of the most intelligent performances of the role in sound, revealing layers of calculation and cruelty beneath the woman's surface sensuality.’
Peter Moores Foundation had a very special relationship with Sir Charles Mackerras, who, with great sorrow, we learned died on Wednesday, 14 July. He recorded with both Chandos, on the Opera in English label, and Opera Rara where his particular and unique understanding of Mozart’s use of ornamentation was invoked in Mozart - The Supreme Decorator. His performances of Mozart were impressive for the sparkle of the playing and the recordings are uniformly notable for their exhilarating freshness and infectious spontaneity.

He was one of the great conductors of the recording era. His distinguished career goes back to the 1940s when he began a life-long association with Sadler’s Wells Opera (now the English National Opera), where he conducted a vast repertoire, from Bach to, most significantly, Janáček. He was also at the forefront of period performance practice, and recorded a legendary performance of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks in 1959, as impressive today as it was when it first appeared.

Much of his work with English National Opera has been preserved on the Chandos Opera in English label, including outstanding performances with Janet Baker in Massenet’s Werther, Donizetti’s Mary Stuart and Handel’s Julius Caesar and the recording that was the start of a fruitful 30 year association with Peter Moores and the PMF - La traviata with Valerie Masterson. His time with Welsh National Opera is celebrated with Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, but Sir Charles was undoubtedly most famous for his championing of the music of Janáček and Peter Moores Foundation is proud to have recorded Janáček’s Osud, The Makropulos Case and Jenůfa with him as part of the Chandos Opera in English series. In his recent ‘golden years’ he made superb recordings of The Magic Flute, The Bartered Bride, Cosí fan tutte, Hansel and Gretel and Salome for Chandos Opera in English - a total of 13 recordings which bear witness to his superb musicianship.

As a man and a supreme musician Sir Charles Mackerras achieved legendary status in his own lifetime. Our deepest sympathy is with Lady Mackerras and her family.
Thomas Adès 'scooped the prestigious Composer of the Year award at the Classical Brit Awards 2010 for his opera, The Tempest'.