English Touring Opera’s Spring season 25 February – 27 May 2023
English Touring Opera presents two model new productions of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia and Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims in Spring 2023
Spring season additionally features a revival of the acclaimed 2020 manufacturing of Handel’s Giulio Cesare
London, Poole, Sheffield, Norwich, York, Durham, Chester, Cambridge, Snape, Canterbury, Cheltenham, Buxton, Leamington Spa and Exeter
English Touring Opera (ETO) presents its first season underneath the management of recent General Director Robin Norton-Hale in Spring 2023, with a nationwide tour of three deeply contrasting operas. The Spring 2023 season options two new productions of operas by no means earlier than staged by ETO – Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia and Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims, every directed by girls staging their first productions with ETO, in addition to a revival of one in every of Handel’s most beloved works, Giulio Cesare. The tour will take excellent productions to audiences in 14 places throughout England, making stay opera accessible and obtainable to all.
Period-instrument specialists The Old Street Band will play for all three operas, the primary time the operas by Donizetti and Rossini have toured within the UK with a interval instrument orchestra.
Donizetti’s tragedy Lucrezia Borgia is staged for the primary time by ETO, in a new manufacturing directed by Eloise Lally, making her ETO directorial debut. An exciting and transferring meditation on energy and motherhood, Lucrezia Borgia is the tragedy of a fancy girl in a harmful scenario. In Lucrezia Donizetti created one in every of opera’s nice antiheroines, in addition to one of the difficult roles within the soprano repertoire. Paula Sides stars within the title position, with Thomas Elwin as Gennaro, Katie Coventry as Orsini and Aidan Edwards as Alfonso, and ETO Music Director Gerry Cornelius conducts.
The tour additionally incorporates a new manufacturing of Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims, one other first for ETO. Intrigue, politics, romance and misplaced baggage all play their half in Rossini’s final Italian opera, as a bunch of entitled visitors from throughout Europe are stranded in a provincial resort on their method to an incredible coronation. Featuring a solid of 27 – one of many largest ever assembled by ETO – the manufacturing features a host of gifted younger singers together with Lucy Hall as Madame Cortese, Luci Briginshaw as Contessa di Folleville, Susanna Hurrell as Corinna and Julian Henao Gonzalez as Conte di Lebenskopf. Valentina Ceschi, who directed ETO’s on-line opera The Firebird to nice acclaim in 2022, makes her ETO theatrical directorial debut, and ETO Artist in Association Jonathan Peter Kenny conducts.
One of Handel’s most liked operas, Giulio Cesare, additionally returns for the tour in a revival of ETO’s acclaimed and standard 2017 manufacturing, with a deliberate 2020 revival curtailed by the pandemic. James Conway returns to direct, and Susanna Hurrell reprises her position as Cleopatra (famous by The Observer in 2020 as ‘simultaneously coquettish, petulant and radiant… wins the audience’s coronary heart as absolutely as she wins Cesare’s‘), with Cesare sung by countertenor Francis Gush, Cornelia by Carolyn Dobbin and Sesto by Margo Arsane. Sergey Rybin conducts The Old Street Band in some of Handel’s best music.
Robin Norton-Hale, General Director of ETO, mentioned: ‘This hugely ambitious season demands virtuosic singing and exceptional dramatic ability from our casts, in stories encompassing farce, social satire, political intrigue and epic tragedy. We’re delighted to be working with two excellent administrators to current two operas ETO has by no means staged earlier than. It would be the first time these operas have been carried out in any respect of our tour venues, and it’s much more of a deal with to listen to them carried out on interval devices. Audiences can anticipate musical and dramatic fireworks!‘
The Spring 2023 announcement comes after the conclusion of their critically acclaimed Handelfest tour, which took three nice Handel operas – Tamerlano, Ottone and Agrippina – to many 1000’s of individuals in seven venues throughout England. ETO additionally accomplished a profitable run of Tutankhamun’s Shoes, an opera for kids exploring Ancient Egyptian historical past and mummification, in theatres, museums and colleges across the nation.
Alongside three theatre-based opera productions in Spring 2023, kids throughout the nation will even be capable to expertise the magic of opera in The Wish Gatherer, the primary in a three-part sequence for Key Stage 2 specializing in serving to kids confront local weather change, and Zoo!, their new opera for kids aged 2-5 and audiences with particular instructional wants and disabilities – each led by rising singers from the primary tour.
More data and tickets for the Spring 2023 season may be discovered on should you click on right here.