Date/Time: Thursday 2 November 2023, 5.30pm

Venue: Curtis Auditorium, Herschel Building, Newcastle University

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All our events remain free and open to all, but pre-booking is required. Bookings for this lecture will open at 10.00am on 26 October. To reserve your place click the booking link below or telephone our booking voicemail line 0191 208 6136.

Chaired by Professor Jo Robinson, Head of the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics

As Opera North’s production of Verdi’s Falstaff, part of its Green Season, arrives in Newcastle, its former Head of Music shows how the great composer plays with ideas of time in this, his final masterpiece. Although the opera, based on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, is set in a bustling present, Verdi uses subtle musical means to evoke a poetic past – and occasionally to stop time altogether.

Biography

Dr. Martin Pickard is a Conductor and Repetiteur at Opera North. He was the company’s Head of Music from 2008-2015.

After studying at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Music he began his operatic career in Germany, working in the opera houses of Kiel and Nuremberg. In 1989 he joined Opera North and has conducted many productions for the company including The Marriage of Figaro, Macbeth, Rigoletto, Carmen, Boris Godunov, Eugene Onegin, La Bohème, Madama Butterfly, Der Rosenkavalier, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Peter Grimes.

Outside Opera North he has worked with English National Opera, Opera Les Azuriales, Bregenzer Festspiele, Buxton Festival, Perth International Festival (Western Australia), Matav Symphony Orchestra (Budapest) and Tiroler Landestheater (Innsbruck). In 2003 he assisted Jiří Bělohlávek on the landmark Glyndebourne production of Tristan und Isolde. Since then he has returned to Glyndebourne regularly as a member of the Festival’s music staff, and in 2005 he made his Glyndebourne conducting debut with The Bartered Bride. Since 2018 he has been closely involved in the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Ring cycle project, acting as repetiteur and assistant conductor to Vladimir Jurowski.

Outside opera he is active as a piano accompanist, appearing amongst others with the tenor Ilker Arcayürek, the mezzo-soprano Catherine Wyn-Rogers and the soprano Lesley Garrett. He lectures on opera at the University of Leeds, where he also holds a PhD in the history of German Romantic opera. In recent years has been a staff member of the Oxenfoord Summer School under the directorship of Malcolm Martineau.