“THERE is that smaller world which is the stage and that larger stage which is the world,” writer and critic Isaac Goldberg once said.

Truth is, it’s all becoming one and the same as enforced isolation connects us with art, music and theatre we probably wouldn’t get to see in normal times.

A case in point is the latest online offering from Opera North. Internationally renowned conductor Tobias Ringborn should have been at the helm of its orchestra for concerts of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra in Leeds and Huddersfield by now.

For Lourenco Macedo Sampaio, viola player with the 40-piece ensemble, this tone poem is his favourite piece. He was delighted when performances were announced a year ago and devastated when they had to be cancelled.

His colleague Daniel Bull, principal cello, got in touch, with a scheme to play and record the opening five minutes., recognisable to many as the opening bars of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“The idea sounded rather crazy”, said Ringborn, “how could I, here in Sweden, go about conducting a large orchestra in England, with each member recording their parts individually?

“I contacted my chamber music partner, the extraordinary pianist Bengt Forsberg. We met in a gorgeous little wooden church in Stockholm and did a couple of takes with my phone camera as I conducted him.

“I sent the film back to Opera North and wished them luck!”

Bull said that adding each instrument was like watching a huge building being constructed, . For added effect, the entire orchestra donned full evening dress, while playing from spare rooms, kitchens and gardens. The exquisite result, 2020: An Isolation Odyssey, is at youtube.com/watch?v=nt8FhIVmR8M

A tiny museum in the South Wales Valleys now finds its exhibitions open to a world audience, with the new show exploring themes of domesticity, sex inequality and isolation due to the current lockdown.

Cynon Valley Museum, in Aberdare hosts an online portfolio from artist Karin Mear who uses not only paints, paper and canvas but also domestic items such as pie dishes and baking tins in her work.

The exhibition Coal Tips and Patty Tins  features pieces showing the reclaimed coal tips of her home town. In Red Kite, the toy of the title is huge, atop a slag tip, diminishing the dark and brooding presence by its scarlet glory. Lockdown has individuals and groups living in separate but interconnected transparent boxes.

Several canvases reveal a recurrent theme of birds and their nests. Mear had a very strong bond with her grandmother and remember being nursed by her “Welsh style” in a woollen shawl, where the adult wraps the shawl around both her and the child or baby, when she was ill and “I’m often drawn to nests as a metaphor for that bond.” cynonvalleymuseum.wales/exhibitions-at-home-by-cynon-valley-museum

The stage of Manchester’s Royal Exchange will be dark until the autumn but the show, as they say, must go on and it’ll be Connect Fest, written by rapper, beatboxer and theatre-maker Testament.

According to director Nickie Miles-Wildin, he has created “a wonderful thread of stories with connection at their heart —  an '80s band wanting to reform, a family Zoom that doesn’t go according to plan and a long-lost love being found over the internet.”

Described as “theatre show, a music festival and a soap-opera rolled into one,” the first of five episodes is online on May 11 at 11am, with others released at the same time daily.
Intriguingly, Connect Fest now has twice the number of players — more than 40, aged between 14 and 82 — than originally planned. Virtual space, it seems, is more accommodating than physical space. https://www.royalexchange.co.uk/