Handel’s forgotten hit

A preview of English Touring Opera’s Ottone which comes to Durham in November, and in which I get to write about two of my passions in one go – Handel opera and Byzantine history.

Fly me to the moon

English Touring Opera bring Haydn’s sci-fi comic opera “Life on the Moon” to the Gala in November – I’ve been finding out a bit more about it, and it looks as it it’s going to be lots of fun.

ETO’s fierce and thrilling King Priam

Anger and terror lie at the heart of English Touring Opera’s thrilling production of Tippett’s opera King Priam – my review from their performance at the Gala Theatre Durham.

English Touring Opera Durham dates

English Touring Opera’s make their Spring visit to the Gala Theatre on 19 and 20 May – details are now on my listings. They’re doing Magic Flute and Tippet’s King Priam. I’d quite like to see their production of the Magic Flute, and the trailer looks great fun (there’s a link on my listing page) […]

Three nights in Venice

I’ve spent the last three evenings in the front row of the Gala Theatre in Durham, immersing myself in baroque Venice, thanks to English Touring Opera. They don’t usually bring their November shows to Durham, but I hope we’ve shown them that there is an audience here for opera beyond the Verdi/Puccini/Mozart classics and that […]

ETO Venetian opera

Baroque opera has been a surprisingly recent discovery for me. It’s so obviously the sort of thing I would like — there’s an intoxicating mix of passion, bad behaviour, sex, tragedy, strong female characters, lots of semiquavers, and, sometimes, recorders — that I wonder what took me so long. There’s more of it about these […]