MONEY from two major funds has ensured that the Ealing Autumn Festival can stage its biggest project to date.

The Arts Council and the Big Lottery Awards for All have both given grants to the festival. This means a new opera called Galileo! – based on the life and work of Galileo Galilei, the ground-breaking astronomer who was born 450 years ago – can go ahead.

The festival takes place in various venues across Ealing from Friday, October 10 to Sunday, October 26.

Artistic director Gillian Spragg said: “Galileo was a truly amazing person.

“He studied and taught art as well mathematics and medicine.

“Influenced by his musician father, Vincenzo, he was intensely practical and had first perfected his own new telescope before setting about recording and interpreting all he observed with it.

“His father was one of the leading inventors of opera, so a new opera seemed exactly the right way to celebrate Galileo’s 450th anniversary and also to respond to the numerous calls for another opera after the huge success of Noye’s Fludde last year.

“We are absolutely thrilled to have won the support of the Arts Council and the Big Lottery so that we can make this something really special. We would have been delighted to have received funds from just one of them but to have been successful with two is tremendous.

“We are also grateful to the London Borough of Ealing for funding awarded earlier in the year.

“Fundraising, especially when you make your first applications, is not easy. There have been times when it has felt like trying to climb Everest with a team wearing only flip-flops and without oxygen. We’ve spent hours and hours learning how to deal with unfamiliar online formats, with rewriting, even with a resubmission, and then nail-biting weeks awaiting the decisions.

“Was it worth it? Yes, of course. It has opened up opportunities not just for this year but for next year and every year after that.”

There are opportunities now to enter the festival’s poetry competition and to take part in preparations for the opera, singing, playing and in many other support roles. For more information, visit www.ealingautumnfestival.co.uk, where tickets for most the events are also available.