In Pictures: Winter Festival 2012

It’s a new year with lots of new performances to come, but before we leave our end-of-2012 indulgences behind, we wanted to share some of our favourite moments the Winter Festival with you, courtesy of our Festival photographer, James Berry.

If you came along to any of our events, then why not share your experiences with us below.

James Weeks conducts EXAUDI at Hoxton Hall. Image: James Berry.

I Fagiolini. Image: James Berry

London Handel Players with Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas. Image: James Berry

Trainee Music Leaders James, Abimaro and Ignacio in “But who knows the East End?” Image: James Berry

Our newest venue Hoxton Hall. Image: James Berry.

Women sing East perform Vivaldi’s Glora. Image: James Berry

Scottish Reels and Winter Riffs. Image: James Berry

Early Opera Company and Christian Curnyn. Image: James Berry

Walking through the East End Backpassages. Image: James Berry

Storyteller Stefan at Shoreditch Church. Image: James Berry

Enjoying Scottish Reels and Winter Riffs. Image: James Berry

Alan Gilbey on tour. Image: James Berry

Alan Gilbey and ‘The Visual Aide’. Image: James Berry

Toujours et Pres de Moi: A Holographic Opera. Image: James Berry

Women sing in performance. Image: James Berry

Tambourines at the ready in Shoreditch Church. Image: James Berry

Matthew Robins in performance

A Holographic Opera. Image: James Berry

the little match girl passion. Image: James Berry

Storyteller Sarah in Shoreditch Church. Image: James Berry

EXAUDI. Image: James Berry

Behind the magic. Image: James Berry.

Audience enjoying Vivaldi’s Angels at Christ Church Spitalfields

Matthew Robins and I Fagiolini in the little match girl passion. Image: James Berry

On the fourth day of the Winter Festival…

Spitalfields Music sent to me… behind the scenes footage from the rehearsals for Toujours et Près de Moi: A Holographic Operaat Hoxton Hall.

A haunting, beautiful hour of love, loss and longing with live and holographic characters set to music from the fantastic EXAUDI. Click play below to see more…

Pepper’s Ghost: The story behind a holographic opera

The Victorians loved ghosts. Their grandparents had relished the terror of 1790s ‘gothic entertainments’ where, by means of magic lanterns, images of ghosts and skeletons had flitted above them and left the more delicate ladies fainting. Then came writers like Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton, who, with their various haunted tales, further stoked the public’s fascination with the supernatural. By the 1860s, communing with the dead was becoming a regular pastime in many a respectable English household, and a number of intelligent, educated doubters became, for a brief spell anyway, believers.

Toujours et Près de Moi

So there could not have been a better time for the first appearance on a theatre stage of a human-size, glowing ghost who could suddenly appear out of nowhere, glide around, and then, just as suddenly, disappear into nowhere.  Two men were responsible for this feat: the civil engineer Henry Dircks and the showman-scientist John Henry Pepper. Dircks originated the idea, basing it on the simple fact that glass is both reflective and transparent. He wanted to put a large plate of clear glass at the front of a main stage and to put an actor playing a ghost on a blackened hidden stage level with the main stage. The glass would reflect the image of the ghost. But Dircks’s design was impractical as only audiences in the balcony seats could see the image. Every theatre impresario Dircks approached turned him away until 1862, when he showed his model to Pepper of London’s Royal Polytechnic Institute, which then needed one novelty after another to attract ticket-paying audiences.

Pepper redesigned Dircks’s model by means of a little geometry and added the use of a bright oxyhydrogen spotlight. He saw that if the glass was slanted toward the audience at a 45 degree angle, and if the actor playing the ghost was put into a kind of expanded orchestra pit and was made to lean back on a slanted board and bear the heat of the spotlight, the actor’s ghostly image reflected on the glass would be visible from every seat in the theatre. Meanwhile, the actor on the main stage had to rely on marks on the floor and beats in the accompanying music to know where and when to interact with the ghost that appeared to the audience to be right next to him.

On 24 December 1862, Pepper first exhibited a ghost in a special staging of a scene from Bulwer Lytton’s novel, A Strange Story. Pepper was so taken back by the response of his distinguished audience that he decided on impulse not to tell them how he did it. He wound up making £12,000 in fifteen months from exhibiting what the public came to know rather unfairly as ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, much to Dircks’s chagrin. Needless to say, there were some in Pepper’s audiences who swore they had seen a real ghost on stage. He did not bother to refute them.

Cynthia Lawford

In video: Toujours et Près de Moi

One of the more unusual events the Winter Festival is an opera with characters that aren’t really there. With a bit of Victorian stage magic Opera Erratica are bringing to life holographic figures to play out the story of Toujours et Près de Moi. As an it’s-almost-the-weekend treat, we thought we’d share a video of their production from The Print Room earlier in the year to give you a flavour of what’s in store.

You can see the show complete with live music from the wonderful EXAUDI on Monday 10 and Tuesday 11 December in the hidden Victorian gem that is Hoxton Hall.

Book you tickets online via our website.

Toujours et Près de Moi: A Holographic Opera
Monday 10 December, 7.00pm-8.00pm & 8.45pm-9.45pm
Tuesday 11 December, 7.00pm-8.00pm & 8.45pm-9.45pm
Hoxton Hall

Sounds: Winter Festival 2012 Playlist

Illustration by Adam Dant

With coats coming back out of the wardrobes and the evenings becoming darker, it’s clear that winter’s slowly on the way and so is our Winter Festival!
To get you in the mood for what’s in store, we’ve put together a Winter Festival 2012 Spotify playlist. We’ve included bits and pieces from all the programmes coming up in December, including Festival artists such as I Fagiolini, EXAUDI, The English Concert and Gallicantus. Just click play below to enjoy. Happy listening!