Ivor Bolton

Ivor Bolton (born 17 May 1958 in Blackrod, England) is an English conductor and harpsichordist. He studied at Clare College (University of Cambridge) (1976–80) and was conducting scholar at the Royal College of Music (1980–81). He later trained as a répétiteur at the National Opera Studio and was appointed conductor of Schola Cantorum of Oxford.

Bolton was Assistant Chorus Master and staff conductor from 1982-1984 for Glyndebourne Festival Opera. He made his operatic conducting debut in 1986 with Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress for Opera 80. He later became music director of Glyndebourne Touring Opera (now Glyndebourne on Tour) from 1992 to 1997. He was principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra from 1994 to 1996. He has also held leadership positions with the St James's Baroque Players in London (with whom he recorded the Bach harpsichord concertos BWV 1053, 1054, 1058 in 1987) and the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music. Other work with period ensembles has included collaboration with the Dresdner Festspielorchester (Dresden Festival Orchestra), which began in 2012.

Bolton

Coordinates: 53°34′41″N 2°25′44″W / 53.578°N 2.429°W / 53.578; -2.429

Bolton (ⁱ/ˈbɒltən/ or locally [ˈbɜʏtn̩]) is a town in Greater Manchester in North West England. A former mill town, Bolton has been a production centre for textiles since Flemish weavers settled in the area in the 14th century, introducing a wool and cotton-weaving tradition. The urbanisation and development of the town largely coincided with the introduction of textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution. Bolton was a 19th-century boomtown, and at its zenith in 1929 its 216 cotton mills and 26 bleaching and dyeing works made it one of the largest and most productive centres of cotton spinning in the world. The British cotton industry declined sharply after the First World War, and by the 1980s cotton manufacture had virtually ceased in Bolton.

Close to the West Pennine Moors, Bolton is 10 miles (16 km) northwest of Manchester. It is surrounded by several smaller towns and villages that together form the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton, of which Bolton is the administrative centre. The town of Bolton has a population of 139,403, whilst the wider metropolitan borough has a population of 262,400. Historically part of Lancashire, Bolton originated as a small settlement in the moorland known as Bolton le Moors. In the English Civil War, the town was a Parliamentarian outpost in a staunchly Royalist region, and as a result was stormed by 3,000 Royalist troops led by Prince Rupert of the Rhine in 1644. In what became known as the Bolton Massacre, 1,600 residents were killed and 700 were taken prisoner.

DR (broadcaster)

DR (from the earlier Danmarks Radio, which was the organization's name until 1996) – officially rendered into English as the Danish Broadcasting Corporation – is Denmark's national broadcasting corporation. Founded in 1925 as a public-service organization, it is today Denmark's oldest and largest electronic media enterprise. The then Danmarks Radio was one of the 23 broadcasting organizations which founded the European Broadcasting Union in 1950.

DR is funded by the levying of a broadcast receiving licence fee, payable in Denmark by all owners of radios, television sets, and, in recent years, computers and other devices capable of receiving DR's video content, whether or not they use DR's services.

DR operates four nationwide FM radio stations, (note that P1 and P2 now share one FM network) as well as a total of eight DAB channels (including the 4 on FM). All stations can be listened to on the web and via mobile radio.

History

DR was founded on 1 April 1925 under the name of Radioordningen, changed to Statsradiofonien in 1926, and Danmarks Radio in 1959. The abbreviated form DR has been used in official documents since 2000.

The Marriage of Figaro

The Marriage of Figaro (Italian: Le nozze di Figaro, pronounced [le ˈnɔttse di ˈfiːɡaro]), K. 492, is an opera buffa (comic opera) in four acts composed in 1786 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with an Italian libretto written by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 1 May 1786. The opera's libretto is based on a stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro ("The Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro"), which was first performed in 1784. It tells how the servants Figaro and Susanna succeed in getting married, foiling the efforts of their philandering employer Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna and teaching him a lesson in fidelity.

The Marriage of Figaro is a cornerstone of the repertoire and appears consistently among the top ten in the Operabase list of most frequently performed operas.

Composition history

Beaumarchais's earlier play The Barber of Seville had already made a successful transition to opera in a version by Paisiello. Although Beaumarchais's Marriage of Figaro was at first banned in Vienna because of its licentiousness, Mozart's librettist managed to get official approval for an operatic version which eventually achieved great success.