Bushra El-Turk’s Woman at Point Zero, with a libretto by Stacy Hardy, is based on Nawal El Saadawi’s 1975 novel Point Zero. Having already appeared in France (at the Aix-en-Provence Festival), Belgium and Luxembourg, it now comes to the Royal Opera House to take centre-stage at this year’s Engender Festival, an initiative to transform gender representation in opera and music theatre. The production is by LOD Music Theatre, and it is co-presented as part of the Aldeburgh...

Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore of 1853 is based on Antonio García Gutiérrez’s play El trovador. Set in fifteenth century Spain it tells of the noble lady Leonora who is in love with the troubadour Manrico, but is herself loved by the Count di Luna, a nobleman in the service of the Prince of Aragon. The Count’s younger brother Garzia supposedly died in infancy when a gypsy was burnt at the stake for allegedly bewitching him, and the charred body of a...

Alban Berg’s first opera Wozzeck, written between 1914 and 1922 before premiering in 1925, is generally regarded as the first opera to be produced in the twentieth century avant-garde style. It represents one of the most famous examples of atonality and also features some Sprechstimme, an expressionist vocal technique that sits between singing and speaking. The story is based on Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, which was left incomplete when he died in 1837. From the...

Blue, written by Tony Award winning composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist Tazewell Thompson, sees a tragedy occur against the backdrop of a clash between a father and son and the way in which black people are treated in society at large. Set in Harlem in 2007 it sees a black Mother and Father have a Son, all of whom are only ever referred to by those names. As soon as The Mother even tells her friends she is pregnant, they tell her there is no future for black boys because of the...

Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, Op. 36, more commonly known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, premiered at the Royan International Festival on 4 April 1977. With the symphony being indicative of the transition from the composer’s earlier dissonant style to his later more tonal style, it sees a soprano sing a different Polish text during each of its three movements. The first is a fifteenth century Polish lament of Mary, mother of Jesus, while the second comes from a...

Georg Friedrich Handel’s Arminio, with a libretto by Antonio Salvi that had previously been set to music by Alessandro Scarlatti, was not a great hit when it premiered on 12 January 1737 at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Despite the composer’s output being as prolific as ever, this was not an easy time for him as he was competing for audiences with the rival Opera of the Nobility when there was really not enough potential audience in London to support two houses. Although...