Hi, my name is Heulwen and I am raising money for The Imperfect Pearl show to tour in England during May and June this year, and to dates in the autumn in London. I am executive producer of the show, along with musician Mark Latimer. You may know Mark as a classical and jazz pianist, but who has recently been suffering from the terrible hand disease dupuytren's contracture, which is slowly and nastily turning his hands into claws. We wanted to develop a project which Mark could do with his hands. We discovered this marvellous composer called Domenico Zipoli, who was born in the 17th century in Prato near Florence, who left a settled life to live in the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay. Then he disappered from the record, but his music was found again mysteriously in a Bolivian Church toilet in 1972. There was relatively little known of his life, but with help from a number of very generous people in Paraguay, Italy and Birmingham, we managed to piece together and breath life into his remarkable story, and produce a new type of action piece, part play, part opera, part concert, with our wonderful but bigou team of countertenor/actor/writer William Towers, soprano Eloise Irving, opera director Emma Rivlin, and a great string trio of Miles Golding, Charlotte Fairbairn and Sophie Gledhill.
When we did a few pilot performances of The Imperfect Pearl in 2013, we were stunned that the production made people cry. His is such a lovely story we wanted to tour in 2015 and share it. We need to raise £10,000 to get it to rural venues, where they often don't get this type of production. Please help us in either donating, or passing on the link to your friends who may be interested in history and Baroque music, though all the family can enjoy our show! THANK YOU!!