Theatron Oneiron

Theatron Oneiron is an emerging professional early opera and early music collective, and one of the leading emerging ensembles specialising in early opera in the South East of England. In 2016, Theatron Oneiron presented Monteverdi’s earliest opera, L’Orfeo, in a fully staged production (St Mary's, Guildford; July 2016), with an international cast featuring current and former singers from several of the leading conservatoires of Britain and Europe, including the Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Royal Conservatory of the Hague, Conservatorium van Amsterdam, Hochschüle fur Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin, Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, and Royal College of Music, Stockholm. Currently based in Oxford, Theatron Oneiron regularly puts on high-standard concerts around Oxford, London and other locations across the South East, and seeks to bridge the divide common in early music performance between performance of consort and musico-dramatic works, by combining solo, dramatic and consort works across its projects. Notable performances to date have included a soirée-style selection of intimate songs and chamber duets, passionate semi-staged opera scenes, and uplifting madrigals themed on the pleasures of love; Couperin's Leçons de Ténèbres at both New College Chapel, Oxford, and Handel House, London; selections from late fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century Flemish and English polyphony; and a programme of Monteverdi and Cavalli laments entitled ‘“Ahi doglia, ahi pianto!”: imagining lament in early opera’. Upcoming projects are planned to include a double bill of Monteverdi's Tancredi e Clorinda and Il Ballo delle Ingrate, Schütz’s Psalmen Davids, and a tour of northern Italy. Further details about Theatron Oneiron's exciting schedule for the next two years are due to be published shortly. The name Theatron Oneiron (loosely, 'Theatre of Dreams') derives from Renaissance performance theories about visions and the 'theatre of the mind', which held that the Passions – of performer and audience alike – were moved by Visions, conjured up by the words sung or spoken by the singer or actor.