Programme Bring up the Bottled Lightning: An Audience with Charles Dickens Simon Callow ~ Dickens is the writer as actor: his appearances in front of huge audiences read- ing from his own books were among the greatest sensations of the Victorian age. Uniquely for the Fidelio Orchestra cafe seires, Simon Callow evokes these phenomenal events. Simon Callow is an actor, author and director. He studied at Queen’s Univer- sity, Belfast, and then trained as an actor at the Drama Centre in London. He joined the National Theatre in 1979, where he created the role of Mozart in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. His many one-man shows include The Mystery of Charles Dickens, Being Shakespeare, A Christmas Carol, Inside Wag- ner’s Head, Juvenalia, The Man Jesus, Tuesday at Tesco’s and, most recent- ly, Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis in the adaptation by Frank McGuinness. His films include A Room with a View, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Shakespeare in Love, Phantom of the Opera and he recently played The Duke of Sandringham in the television series Outlander. He directed Shirley Val- entine in the West End and on Broadway, Single Spies at the NT, Les En- fants du Paradis at the RSC, Carmen Jones at the Old Vic, as well as the film of The Ballad of the Sad Café. He has written biographies of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton, and Charles Dickens and three autobiographical books: Being An Actor, Love Is Where It Falls, and My Life in Pieces. The third volume of his massive Orson Welles biography, One Man Band, appeared in 2016; Inside Wagner’s Head, a short biography of Wagner, was published in 2018, and his most recent book, with the photographer Derry Moore, is London’s Great Theatres, which appeared last autumn. Music is his great passion. He has directed a number of operas and has made many appearances with the LPO, the LSO and the London Mozart Players. Welcome to the Fidelio Orchestra Cafe, I hope you are looking forward to this evening with us. We have taken all precautions to ensure your safety is prioritised during these very special events. The circumstances in which we are living are extremely challenging for live music making and for any artistic endeavour that is based on sharing a physical space together. However uncertain and still unsafe our cities and our societies feel, however vague and often incoherent the guidance we are receiving appears, I have decided to go on with this project, because I believe the benefits to the musicians involved and to the audience so intensly craving for spiritual recovery outdo the risks. I am grateful to see that you have so eagerly taken on this daring idea and I thank you for the trust you are showing us by being here tonight. As our societies slowly make an attempt to go back to normal life, these concerts want to be a small contribution towards rebuilding a society with taste. I have created this space with the ambition to make music not just as “entertainment”, but as a bettering practice for everybody. Music is ultimately a great summary of human aspiration and rebuilding from music means rebuilding from this fundaamental desire to understand and to improve: it means rebuilding from human freedom. This is a longterm project. If we want to make society at large interested in music, if we want to give the opportunity to those who don’t know what music is about to love it and ultimately to contribute to the freedom of the individual in our society, we need to work on finding new ways of communicating music for what it is, rather than for what we think it should be. This won’t happen from one day to the next, but I like to think that the Fidelio Orchestra project is a small contribution in that direction. R.Morales- Fidelio Orchestra, music director ~.