In this video, Hannah Nepilova talks to conductor Oliver Zeffman about Eight Songs from Isolation, an opera shot entirely on iPhone.
Oliver Zeffman started playing the violin when he was four years old, going on to play with the London Schools Symphony Orchestra. “At some point,” he told The Times, “I decided that conducting looked way more fun than sitting at the back of an orchestra with a violin.” But getting an orchestra to conduct was not so simple, which is why, at the age of just 16, after a letter-writing campaign to raise funds from arts institutions, Zeffman created his own orchestra. The Melos Sinfonia was born.
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One of Oliver Zeffman’s early tours was with the orchestra’s concert staging of George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s celebrated opera Written on Skin.
Oliver Zeffman studied history and Russian at university, and spent his year abroad at the St Petersburg State Conservatory, followed by a year at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Since then he has focused on innovative musical projects, including Music X Museums: a series of concerts held in London at the V&A, the Cutty Sark, the Science Museum and the British Library to bring classical music to a new audience.
This interview about Eight Songs from Isolation is part of a series of videos in which we interview artists who are doing interesting things during lockdown.
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