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Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest Wins RPS Award; UK Premiere at ROH

Jun. 03, 2013

Gerald Barry’s <em>The Importance of Being Earnest</em> Wins RPS Award; UK Premiere at ROH

Gerald Barry’s wonderfully inventive comic opera, The Importance of Being Earnest, has just received the Royal Philharmonic Society's Best Large-Scale Composition prize. Called “the most confident, volatile comic opera for a decade” by The Independent, Earnest is an inventive and brilliantly witty work that utilizes an enormous range of genres including the seamless incorporation of megaphones, marching jackboots, and an ostinato of smashed plates. The RPS awards, which were initiated in 1989, are the highest honors accorded to live classical music in the UK. In bestowing the award, the judges provided the following comment:

The forceful originality of this work smashes conventions alongside plates, and miraculously provides the most well-worn quotes with a freshness and originality. Liberation and exhilaration marked its London premiere last year.


With impeccable timing, the Royal Opera House in London is poised to showcase the work with a new production opening at the Linbury Studio Theatre on June 14. In this first UK staging, Tim Murray conducts the Britten Sinfonia, this year’s winner of the RPS award for Best Ensemble, with direction by Ramin Gray. The cast features Benedict Nelson as Algernon Moncrieff, Paul Curievici as John Worthing, Ida Falk Winland as Cecily Cardew, Stephanie Marshall as Gwendolen Fairfax, and Alan Ewing in the role of Lady Bracknell.

Co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association along with the Barbican Centre in London, Earnest received its concert premiere in 2011 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and recently had its staged premiere in a production by Sam Brown at the Opéra National de Lorraine, conducted by by Tito Muñoz, in March 2013. The new Royal Opera House production runs through June 22.

For more information on Gerald Barry, please visit www.schott-music.com.

To learn more about the Royal Opera House production of The Importance of Being Earnest, please go to www.roh.org.uk.

Read about the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards at rpsmusicawards.com.

Gerald Barry
The Importance of Being Earnest (2009/2010)
opera in three acts
libretto (Eng.) by the composer based on the play by Oscar Wilde
soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto, tenor, bass-baritone, 2 basses; male chamber choir
1(pic).1(ca).1.bcl.2(2.cbsn)-2.2(1.Dtpt).1.1-timp.2perc-pno(cel).str
90’

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