A New Year’s Celebration
Welsh National Opera Orchestra, Swansea

CELEBRATING the new year with the mighty orchestra from the Welsh National Opera is a glorious start to 2025.

The orchestra are busy at the moment as they recreate a Viennese new year traditional concert series and prepare for the spring opera season. The company play without a conductor and each piece is introduced by orchestra leader and first violin David Adams. The WNO are the only opera company in Wales and enjoy a world-class reputation.

As the WNO orchestra are hoping to make these Viennese concert series an annual event, the concert programme is heavy on waltzes and polkas and the audience loves every second. Of course, there is opera and WNO associates soprano Erin Rossington and Bass William Stevens provide the vocal gymnastics.

Rossington is a young soprano winning the International Voice of the Future award at the Llangollen International Eisteddfod. Both she and Stevens joined the WNO associate programme in mid-2024 which aims to develop their singing and stagecraft within an opera company.

The orchestra and associate programme are now both at risk as the barbarous cuts to the company’s funding begin to bite. Every member of the orchestra donned protest T-shirts for the evening proclaiming the need to protect the WNO.

I spoke to one of the violinists at the interval about the impact of the cuts and she told me that some of the company are being threatened with contract changes making some of the orchestra part-time. To expect the orchestra to continue to perform at their high level while the musicians can only practise part-time is like expecting world-class performances from an athlete who only trains occasionally. Wales provides itself on being the land of song but how long will that be a reality as the cuts to the WNO bite?

We kick off with a thunderous overture to Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus before moving into younger brother Josef Strauss’s Dragonfly polka.

Opera in Wales is not an elitist night out for the rich and privileged but is accessible and enjoyed by a diverse audience. The WNO sits at the pinnacle of an ecosystem made up of local choirs and choral societies and undermining the company will affect that.

We all need bread to sustain our physical selves, but we also need roses to sustain our spirit and imagination.

The new year concert is a showcase for musicianship and virtuosity of the finest level and most definitely provides balm during the midwinter.

Tours until January 17. Please see www.wno.org.uk for details.