ALBERT HERRING

May Day is looming, and the small town of Loxford is in chaos. All the potential May Queens are deemed morally unsuitable. Desperate, the locals decide a May King will have to do instead. They choose the blameless Albert Herring, from the greengrocers. He isn’t keen, but stuck firmly under his mother’s thumb, he’ll do what he is told. However, after one rum-laced lemonade at the May Day ceremony, Albert disappears, and even greater chaos ensues.

Music Benjamin Britten

Libretto Eric Crozier

First performance Glyndebourne, 1947

Sung in English

Lasts approximately 2 hours 45 minutes

The opera’s librettist Eric Crozier took a story by Maupassant and transformed it into a quintessentially English comedy. Britten’s music characterises the town’s inhabitants with a biting satirical wit – but there’s a touch of affection, too, for a vanished way of life. The intimacy of the Howard Assembly Room is the perfect environment for Giles Havergal’s delightfully immersive production.

Cast includes:

Dame Josephine Barstow, Katie Bray, William Dazeley, Amy Freston, Richard Mosley-Evans, Claire Pascoe, Dominic Sedgwick, Heather Shipp

Conductor Garry Walker

Director Giles Havergal

Associate Director Elaine Tyler-Hall

Set and Costume Designer Leslie Travers

Original Lighting Designer John Bishop

Movement Director Tim Claydon

Albert Herring will be streamed online via our partners at OperaVision. OperaVision is a streaming platform providing a window on the varied landscape of musical theatre for a connected world – all for free, live and on demand.

It starts with a casual bet. The wily cynic Don Alfonso wagers that the fiancées of two young men, complacent in their romantic notions of love, won’t stay faithful for a minute if put to the test. It sounds harmless enough and, anyway, the lovers are entirely sure of themselves. But there is cruelty in this game of love and chance.

It’s difficult to think of an opera that contains more music of sheer beauty than Così fan tutte – or has a libretto that is more unsettling. The plot is a work of supreme artifice, yet the opera charts the boundaries of real and feigned emotion, trust and deception, loyalty and desire, with unsparing accuracy and truthfulness. Tim Albery’s beautiful, thoughtful, 18th centurystyled production is set firmly in a pitiless Age of Reason.

‘Go to this production: there are lots of good Così s, but this is in a class apart.’

Michael Tanner, The Spectator

Music Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Libretto Lorenzo da Ponte

First performance Vienna, 1790

Sung in English with English titles

Lasts approximately 3 hours

Cast includes:

Fiordiligi Alexandra Lowe

Dorabella Heather Lowe

Ferrando Anthony Gregory

Guglielmo Henry Neill

Don Alfonso Quirijn de Lang

Conductor Clemens Schuldt / Chloe Rooke

Director Tim Albery

Set and Costume Designer Tobias Hoheisel

Lighting Designer David Finn