Saturday Opera: Tudor Queens

Welcome to Saturday Opera at the Old Town Hall Scene. We promise high quality and good cheer, high notes, sorrow, and drama in the best operatic style. The singers personally present what they are singing. There will be familiar and beloved arias and duets, and sometimes there will be a theme throughout the performance or a section from an opera. The doors open at 14:30. We recommend a visit to Skyggesiden bar before or after the performance. You can come and reserve a spot with us when the doors open at 14:30 and then go down to the bar again and return at 15:00. Unfortunately, it is not allowed to bring drinks from Skyggesiden bar up to us. Today's Program Welcome to a Saturday Opera in the shadow of the Tudor throne, where four women's destinies are woven together in a deadly game of love, power, and survival. The English Tudor royal house was filled with extreme passion, bloody betrayal, and ruthless power struggles. King Henry VIII, who ruled England from 1509 to 1547, was a tyrannical ruler who shook all of Europe by marrying six times in his obsessive quest for a male heir. His turbulent love life led to executions, religious revolution, and a deep division within the nation. Today, you will not meet the great armies or the historic battles. You will meet the deepest abyss of the female heart. Read more about the queens at the very bottom of the page. Performers Sigrid Vetleseter Bøe, soprano Siv Oda Hagerupsen, mezzo-soprano Dorina Komani Haslum, piano The concert series is supported by the Cultural Directorate. Tickets To secure your ticket, we recommend purchasing it through TicketCo. If it is sold out on TicketCo, you can contact us via SMS on the same day, as we sometimes receive cancellations. Send an SMS to 95 23 24 01. About 50 spots are already reserved by our Gold Members who come every Saturday. Read more about Gold Membership at the bottom of the page. Address Old Town Hall Scene, Christiania Square 1 The orange house to your right when you stand with your back to the statue of HANSKEN at Christiania Square and look down Rådhusgaten towards the Opera. Right next to Rådhusgata 30. Our door is red and has a brass handle. A Bit of History The story of Saturday Opera began back in 2002 when the Cultural Enthusiasts started the opera pub at Dockside at Aker Brygge. The concept quickly became popular and developed through concerts at several venues in Oslo. By the fall of 2008, the Cultural Enthusiasts had entered into a collaboration with Kristiania Bar & Café in Østbanehallen, where Operanachspiel was established as a regular Saturday offering. The audience flocked, but it soon proved challenging to combine the concerts with a busy nightlife venue. On January 7, 2009, Opera for the People was founded as a continuation of the Cultural Enthusiasts, with a clear goal of making opera accessible to a broad audience. In the spring of 2010, the concept was further developed into its own Saturday venture under the auspices of Opera for the People. The ambition was to create a regular meeting place where the audience could experience professional opera singers up close in an informal and inclusive atmosphere. When the series moved to Pigalle in Grønland in the fall of 2013, it was named Saturday Opera. That same fall, Opera for the People took over the operation of the Old Town Hall Scene, which is leased by the Cultural Agency of Oslo municipality. On February 6, 2014, the first Saturday Opera concert was held on the stage, where the series is still located. Today, Saturday Opera is the flagship of Opera for the People and one of Norway's longest-running regular opera series. Every spring and fall, the audience is invited to weekly concerts from February to April and from September to November. PublikUng PublikUng is an organization that lowers the threshold for young people to attend opera and concerts with classical music. The vision is to spread interest in these cultural forms and make them more accessible to those between 18 and 30 years old. PublikUng currently has just under 2000 members, and i