The 2019 OBERTO conference will take place at Oxford Brookes University on Tuesday, 10 September 2019. A day of presentations and panels, featuring opera scholars as well as opera industry professionals, will explore how opera houses and opera audiences create repertoires, and whether and how the operatic canon needs to be refreshed for the twenty-first century.

9am Registration

9.45am Welcome

10am Session 1: Foundations

Mike Gibb (Founder of Operabase): New Opera in the 21st Century – A Guided
Tour

Cormac Newark (Guildhall School of Music and Drama): The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon

11am Coffee break

11.30am Session 2: Interventions

Leo Doulton (director and librettist): Frankenstein’s Donster: Reinventing Don
Giovanni with the Arcola Queer Collective

Andrew Holden (Oxford Brookes University / Turin): Don’t Mention the ‘C’
Word – Negotiating and Confronting the Transnational Circulation of Opera

Imani Danielle Mosley (Wichita State University): ‘The Positives Outweigh the
Negatives’: Performing Opera in the Age of Social Justice and Social Media

1pm Lunch

2pm Session 3: Institutions and Orthodoxies

Adriana Festeu (Royal Academy of Music): Programming Operatic Repertoire
for Young Singers

Sid Wolters-Tiedge (Forschungsintitut für Musiktheater, University of
Bayreuth): ‘Verachtet mir die Meister nicht’: Directing the Operatic Canon as
Institutional Practice in Germany

Alexandra Wilson (Oxford Brookes University): Dead White Men and the Spectre of Elitism

3.30pm Tea break

4pm Session 4: Marginalia?

Jeremy Gray (Bampton Classical Opera): Footnote Operas: Probing the
Marginalia of Classical Opera

Alexandra Monchick (California State University, Northridge): Outside the
Operatic Canon after #MeToo

5pm Panel Discussion

with Benedict Nelson (baritone), Brian Robins (Early Music World), Jane-Eve
Straughton (English Touring Opera), Michael Volpe (Opera Holland Park)

The conference takes place in Headington Hill Hall, on the Headington Hill Campus. Directions can be found here: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brookes/contacts-maps-and-campuses/headington-campus/

The conference is free, and lunch, tea and coffee will be provided. Please register if you plan to attend by emailing tde-oberto@brookes.ac.uk  before 1 September 2019, and include any dietary preferences.