The country’s premier opera house is taking a new work about wartime heroine Dame Vera Lynn to care homes and day centres. Beginning this week, Glyndebourne musicians will be on tour with the project about the We’ll Meet Again singer and longtime Ditchling resident. They will visit care homes including St Rita's near Ditchling, where the entertainer spent her final years.
Dame Vera’s daughter Virginia Lewis-Jones will attend this session, which takes place on November 20, as will her archivist. Glyndebourne’s Good Company initiative takes professional opera singers and orchestral musicians into care facilities for interactive sessions with residents and staff. The venture began on Monday, Remembrance Day, and sees a Glyndebourne singer and five instrumentalists from the Glyndebourne Sinfonia undertaking the largest tour to care homes and day centres since the initiative was launched in 2021.
The musicians will be performing a new work, Sincerely Yours, inspired by the letters sent to Dame Vera, the Forces' Sweetheart, during the period in which she hosted her long-running BBC radio show of the same name. The Good Company initiative sees professional opera singers and musicians perform to care home residents (Image: Glyndebourne) The show, which began in 1941, went out on the BBC World Service every Sunday night for the duration of the war and became hugely popular with soldiers overseas, who sent in up to 2,000 song requests every week. Directed by Fiona Dunn, the pie.