The Hearn Recital Room
Took place on Mon 3 Feb 2025, 1.10pm

Music

Lunchtime Recital: Samantha Crawford & Berrak Dyer

£10
60 minutes
The Hearn Recital Room
Took place on Mon 3 Feb 2025, 1.10pm

Samantha Crawford | soprano
Berrak Dyer | piano

Freedom Cries Out | A programme telling stories of displaced people and refugees through song. It touches on themes of Homeland, Exile, War, Family, Hope and New Beginnings.

Song cycles by Raymond Yiu, Shawn Okpebholo and Jake Heggie with selected songs by Roxanna Panufnik, Elisabeth Lutyens and Cheryl Frances-Hoad among others.

British Australian soprano Samantha Crawford is equally at home on the opera stage as she is on the concert platform. She has been praised for her unconstricted soprano radiance.

Berrak Dyer studied at GSMD and the National Opera Studio. She has worked on Snow, Goldilocks and the Three Little Pigs, The Yellow Wallpaper, conductor for Robin Hood, Beauty and the Seven Beasts (The Opera Story), Rhhonda Rips It Up (Welsh National Opera), Eugene Onegin, The Dancing Master (Buxton International Festival), assistant conductor on Cosi fan Tutte (ETO), Psychosis 4.48, Phaedra, The Lost Thing, Blue Woman (Royal Opera House). Gigi, L’Elisir D’amore, Il Barbiere di Siviglia (West Green House Opera), La Fanciulla del West, Lakme, La Traviata, Eugene Onegin, Hansel und Gretel, Itch, Tosca (Opera Holland Park). Berrak conducted the Opera Scenes at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in 2023. This year Berrak will be joining Britten Pears Arts on the world premiere of A Visit to Friends by Colin Matthews and returning to Buxton as MD for Shorts.

The programme features the world premiere of a song cycle by Raymond Yiu especially commissioned for the project and supported by the RVW Foundation, and includes the UK premiere of Shawn Okpebholo’s song cycle, Words Like Freedom. The programme will premiere in November at The St. Marylebone Festival, London.

In partnership with Refugee Education UK