Chandos is proud to present a recording of Flight, an opera by Jonathan Dove, one of the UK’s most sought-after composers.

This is the first release of Dove’s airport comedy, which was premiered with enormous success by the Glyndebourne Touring Company in 1998.

The work was subsequently performed at the Glyndebourne Festival and since then it has toured internationally, meeting with an enthusiastic response from audiences and music critics alike.

This recording with the cast of the original production features some of the world’s most admired singers.

Flight was filmed by NVC for Channel 4 and was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1998.


Flight’s librettist, April de Angelis, says that Flight was inspired by the true story of a refugee who was living at Charles de Gaulle airport. It takes as its premise the notion that an airport is a theatre of sorts, where people are at the extreme edges of their lives, parting from loved ones or coming home. The opera acknowledges the strangeness of flight, and the central character of the Refugee becomes a catalyst for each of the other characters’ self-examination.

This three-act opera can be seen as a compelling modern day parable of messy human lives becoming grounded by emotional turbulence. The characters who join the Refugee and the airport staff in the bleak and transitory world of the airport lounge are the married couple Bill and Tina, who are going on holiday in an attempt to rekindle romance, an Older Woman who is meeting her fiancé – a younger man she met in Mallorca – and a married couple who are emigrating to Minsk (the woman is heavily pregnant). There are no minor characters, each has an essential part to play. In a brilliant coup de théâtre all the travellers, including the jilted Older Woman, fly off with new hope, a bitter-sweet resolution in as equivocal an ending as that of Così fan tutte.

Dove’s daring and deceptively simple score provides a perfect counterpoint to the precise and witty libretto. Flight, with its subtlety, pathos and humour, bids fair to becoming an enduring classic of late twentieth-century opera.

'Flight is an assured, confident and effective opera whose characters are striving to expand their horizons…'
Recorded live at Glyndebourne in 1999, Jonathan Dove and April de Angeliss brilliant comic opera about travellers stranded in an airport is as angaging on disc as it was in the thatre (and I write having seen it at least five times.
'anyone who cares about opera as a living art form will rejoice in Chandos decision to issue the BBCs recording of Flight from Glyndebourne with the original cast.
''anyone who cares about opera as a living art form will rejoice in Chandos' decision to issue the BBC's recording of Flight from Glyndebourne with the original cast.'
'You don't need to have encountered Flight in the theatre to get a thrill from listening to it at home.'
'The music is immensely appealing, the characters are sharply etched and the situations are audacious…The singing is first-rate, and the audience reaction - plenty of laughter - helps it all go with a bang.'
'Chandos has done it proud.'
'New operas as splendid as this one are not exactly thick on the ground. In truth they never have been, but this is a major event.'
'The Glyndebourne company's performance is precise and vivid… The orchestration is highly effective, the score well played, the sound well recorded. David Parry and the whole musical team must feel pleased; so too, let's hope, the composer.'


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