Nicholas Chalmers debuts at Royal Opera House
Senior Associate Artist of the Royal Ballet and Opera, Nicholas Chalmers makes his conducting debut with the company at the Linbury Theatre 10 – 24 October 2024 in a Bernstein double bill Trouble in Tahiti and A Quiet Place. These operas, inspired by Leonard Bernstein’s own life and written in 1951 and 1983 respectively have never been performed on the Royal Opera House stage before now. The production is directed by Oliver Mears.
You can hear Chalmers on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune from the 9 October discussing the opera with Sean Rafferty.
Its subject matter was ahead of its time. “There’s psychosis, there’s mental health breakdown, there’s fast narratives,” Chalmers says. “We’re dealing here with a lot of very difficult topics.” This was rare in the operatic world of the 1980s, where stories inspired by myth, legend or outlandish fantasy were more in vogue than gritty realism.
The Times, Oct 2024