Our vision is very simple
To allow people to hear great British operas that they may only have read about, by recording them, to the highest standards possible.
How we do it…
Research
We research the history of opera and related works in Britain’s richly varied musical theatre tradition.
Record
We make studio recordings with professional musicians, following original scores and texts as much as possible, and taking into account what we know of the composer’s intentions.
Release
We release our acclaimed recordings on CD and in streaming formats, accompanied by full texts and informative essays.
Our Team of Trustees
Valerie Langfield
David Chandler
Christopher Wiley
Benjamin Hamilton
Research
These are not just high standards of performance, but also high standards of preparation of the performing materials.
We obtain copies of the original materials, usually a manuscript score, and typeset it, straightening out inconsistencies and mistakes in the original, and sorting out anything that isn’t clear, and if a decision has had to be made, marking it in the score, so that the performers know exactly what the composer wrote, and what’s had to be adjusted.
The consequence is that you, the audience, can trust that what you hear is what the composer really intended.
Record and Release
We make professional studio recordings with first-class singers and musicians. These are released on CD, and are also available as downloads and on streaming services. The CDs are accompanied by informative booklets that contain introductory essays on the works and their background, as well as a full text of what was recorded. Our recordings have been widely reviewed and several of them have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
Valerie Langfield is a freelance musician, composer, teacher and author, based in south Manchester, UK. She has substantial experience of editing British operas for performance and recording: for Opera Ireland, and the Eduard von Winterstein Theatre in Annaberg-Buchholz, Balfe’s Falstaff; for Opera South, the Royal Dublin Society, and the Victorian Lyric Opera Company (Maryland), Balfe’s Bohemian Girl; for the European Opera Centre, arias from Wallace’s Amber Witch; for Victorian Opera North-west, The Maid of Artois (Balfe), Robin Hood (Macfarren), and a collection of Victorian opera overtures; for Lucerne Opera and Retrospect Opera, Smyth’s The Boatswain’s Mate; and arias for several other companies. She edited the manuscripts of Smyth’s Fête Galante, Loder’s Raymond and Agnes, and Stanford’s Shamus O’Brien for Retrospect Opera. She is a Trustee of the Carl Rosa Archive Trust and a member of the Editorial Committee of Musica Britannica.
She is a noted authority on the life and music of the English song-composer Roger Quilter, and is a contributor to the New Grove Dictionary, MGG, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the Cambridge Berlioz Encyclopedia.
Valerie edited Dora Bright’s Piano Concerto and Variations for Piano and Orchestra, and Ruth Gipps’ Piano Concerto in G minor, all released on the SOMM label in 2019, and contributed a chapter on the songs of Cyril Scott for the Companion to Scott’s life and music, published by the Boydell Press. She is at present editing the diaries of the Cambridge musicologist Edward Dent, and a collection of letters from Dent to Jack Gordon, staff producer at Sadler’s Wells in the 1930s.
She is also active as an accompanist and orchestral pianist.
David Chandler is a professor of English at Doshisha University in Kyoto. His background is in English Romanticism (M. Phil and D. Phil, Oxon), but he has wide-ranging research interests in English and Italian opera. He has edited books on the Italian composers Alfredo Catalani and Italo Montemezzi and published many articles and reviews on British musical theatre, including pioneering accounts of Edward Cympson (1838-1905), Alan Doggett (1936-78) and nineteenth-century musical adaptations of Charles Dickens’s novels. David now spends much of his time writing about Retrospect Opera’s releases, and has essays forthcoming on Cups and Saucers, The Boatswain’s Mate, and Charles Dibdin.
Both Valerie Langfield and David Chandler are contributors to the volume of essays on Musicians of Bath and Beyond: Edward Loder and his Family, edited by Professor Nicholas Temperley, and published by Boydell and Brewer.
Christopher Wiley is Head of the Department of Music and Media and Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK, and a National Teaching Fellow. He studied at the universities of Oxford and London, receiving his PhD in 2008. His research interests encompass classical music and opera, musical theatre, popular music, musical biography and life-writing, literature and music, music and gender, and higher education learning and teaching. He has published six books including Women’s Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, Stage and Screen, as well as delivering over 70 papers at conferences in the UK and overseas, and publishing more than 40 book chapters and articles appearing in journals including The Musical Quarterly, Music & Letters, Journal of Musicological Research, Women’s History, Women’s History Review and Arts & Humanities in Higher Education. He is an internationally recognised expert on Ethel Smyth, the subject of many journal articles, book chapters, magazine articles, and public talks, and he is currently editing two books on Smyth, including The Cambridge Companion to Ethel Smyth. He has worked as a pre-event speaker for Glyndebourne and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as for concerts in major Central London venues such as Southwark Cathedral and the National Musicians’ Church, and he was invited by Woking Borough Council to deliver the speech at the unveiling of the town’s statue of Ethel Smyth in 2022. He has written programme notes for the BBC Proms, BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, and other organisations internationally, and published over 60 reviews of live performances of musical theatre and opera for Musical Theatre Review, as well as writing liner notes for multiple commercially released recordings. He also frequently contributes expert comment to national and international radio, television, and print media. In addition to his work for Retrospect Opera, he is Musical Executor and a Trustee of The Richard Stoker Trust. Website: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/christopher-wiley
Benjamin Hamilton is a conductor, translator, Artistic Director of Warwickshire Choristers, and sits on the Board of Warwickshire Music Education Hub as well as Retrospect Opera.
A strategic arts leader with a PhD from the University of Warwick, Benjamin’s artistic aim is to bring high-quality musical experiences to all, as audience members and performers, with an emphasis on sharing classical music with communities that might not otherwise engage with it.
As a conductor, Benjamin trained with Paul McGrath, Toby Purser, and is currently mentored by Mark Heron. A special relationship with opera in particular has seen him conduct 22 productions in repertoire spanning from Monteverdi to the present day. Benjamin is a regular guest conductor of various ensembles (including the EU Chamber Orchestra) and also with his own opera company, HighTime, at the Belgrade Theatre where he is currently resident as a Springboard Artist.
Benjamin’s work in opera has also nurtured his enthusiasm for immediately accessible translations: most recently a grime Die Fledermaus (Bat Out of Hackney) for Hackney Empire; an “Oxford Don” Don Giovanni for Hampstead Garden Opera; and a more traditional Carmen for Warwick Arts Centre.
Benjamin is musical director for a number of choirs, spanning the spectrum of genres and previous experiences: from the Cheshire Fire Choir (a 16-strong modern music choir from Gareth Malone’s Sing Whilst You Work) to Ex Urbe (20-part chamber choir with recordings for Radio 3) and from the Warwickshire Choristers (the largest unauditionned boys choir in the UK) to Hampton Singers (a traditional 60-strong choral society).
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