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Times of Malta meets
Gillian Zammit who will be directing Teatru Salesjan’s adult community choir for over 40s commencing on April 19 and being held on Monday evenings, culminating in a performance at the end of June.
What are your aims for this multinational choir?
I believe there is a strong social aspect in belonging to a choir. The camaraderie of singing in a group that is working to create harmonies, where every singer has a responsibility to themselves and, more importantly, to the rest of the group, creates a deep bond.
Music brings people together and singing, in particular, helps unlock emotions and can help reduce stress levels. Singing can also improve mental alertness, concentration and also memory in older adults.
Soprano Gillian Zammit will be directing Teatru Salesjan’s adult community choir for the over 40s, which will commence on April 19 and will be held on Monday evenings. This project, which will also take on a multinational dimension, will give participants the opportunity to share their work in a performance at the end of June.
“The desire for a multinational choir arose from witnessing a change in the fabric of the people in our community. Creating a choir made up of various nationalities can be a new bridge for expats to meet people and form friendships,” Zammit said.
Zammit had long wished to be involved in some kind of musical community project. She has previously worked with children’s choirs such as the BOV Joseph Calleja Choir, which she has trained from its inception in 2010 and, most recently, the children’s choir for St John’s Co-Cathedral Foundation. She has also worked with a number of adult choirs for operatic productions including the Manoel Theatre’s Mon
The Manoel Theatre is soon set to raise the curtain on Dido and Aeneas as this year’s beloved annual opera – and Malta’s historic national theatre has overcome all odds to bring it to the stage.
Laura Bonnici finds out more.
A tragic tale of love and loss, royalty and witches, stormy seas and magical misdirection. Although this sounds like the makings of a modern hit movie, in fact, this dramatic story thrilled its first audiences on stage more than 300 years ago.
Dido costume sketch by costume designer Luke Azzopardi
Such are the universal and timeless themes of Dido and Aeneas, the first – and ultimately, the only – opera written by great English baroque composer Henry Purcell, based on a libretto by Nahum Tate. The opera was inspired by book IV of Virgil’s poem The Aeneid, with Purcell translating both the epic tale and its deeper ideas regarding death and deception for a then-contemporary audience.
Teatru Manoel is soon set to raise the curtain on Dido and Aeneas as this year’s beloved annual opera – and Malta’s historic national theatre has overcome all odds to bring it to the stage. Laura Bonnici finds out more.
A tragic tale of love and loss, royalty and witches, stormy seas and magical misdirection. Although this sounds like the makings of a modern hit movie, in fact, this dramatic story thrilled its first audiences on stage more than 300 years ago.
Such are the universal and timeless themes of
Dido and Aeneas, the first – and ultimately, the only – opera written by great English Baroque composer Henry Purcell, based on a libretto by Nahum Tate. The opera was inspired by book IV of Virgil’s poem The Aeneid, with Purcell translating both the epic tale and its deeper ideas regarding death and deception for a then-contemporary audience.