Beauty and the Seven Beasts – Synopsis

Beauty is searching for her soulmate and discovers an app which offers her a promise: ‘Find true love in seven dates! Results guaranteed!’ The app uses a series of magic mirrors to connect romance-seeking singles. Beauty is guided by one of the magic mirror’s many matchmakers who must ensure that she finds true love by…

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Bringing the music of Beauty and the Seven Beasts to life (by Berrak Dyer)

“It is no mean feat at the best of times to record this catalogue of music in two days, but to add fuel to the fire, we were also working on seven very different compositions and styles of music… A composer makes choices on instrumentation, orchestration, effects, emotional motivations, technical demands, all of which add up to create their unique sound world.”

Composing Beauty and the Seven Beasts (by Vahan Salorian)

“The Opera Story’s decision to involve just two performers on stage, alongside multiple filmed singers, has taken the potential limitations and frustrations of putting on a production in a post-COVID world and turned them on their head. The cast of singers is the company’s largest and most formidable to date, thanks in part to us being able to record many of them in advance. The use of film will add a whole extra dimension to the space and set design and as always, the orchestra sound amazing.”

Creating a world of Beauty (by Dominic Kimberlin)

“Beauty sets out to find love with an open heart and the faith that there is someone out there who will accept and return her feelings. She believes that true love is not just something found in fairy tales but can really be discovered, shared, and rejoiced in. Her path may bring her to places she did not foresee and she may be guided by forces that she does not fully understand, but she strives to maintain her faith even in the face of the unknown.”

A few words from the director (by Aylin Bozok)

“As the audience we are invited to watch a social experiment in a laboratory on people who have no idea they are in the box and/or are being watched. Only one of the characters actually knows what’s going on and is aware they all are locked in and, although we don’t think they can see us, well, maybe we are seen and maybe we are also part of the experiment.”

Why opera? (by Lee Reynolds)

“Opera is capable of putting across our passions and our stories far more powerfully than any other medium. We are a storytelling animal, and what Pandora’s Box does is tell an urgent, compact and complex story.”

Don’t open the box (by Dominic Kimberlin)

It is one thing to imagine and quite another thing to know. Even if the truth is painful, it is still the truth. Does it not deserve to be uncovered? By such noble reasoning, we can bring about our own destruction…

When a score comes to life for the first time (by Berrak Dyer)

“We leave the rehearsal room singing lines from the opera, we quote parts of the libretto to each other within other contexts, and this is when we know the work has paid off and that we all have the privilege to be creating something special and for the very first time.”

Thoughts on writing music for a new opera (by Dani Howard)

To me, the main difference between this project and all of my other work was the sheer length. A 90-minute opera is significantly different to the 2-15 minute pieces I have been used to writing. The only way I can describe this difference, would be like that of writing a short story versus a novel.