UK / WEST END OPERA NEWS COVERAGE

BroadwayWorld is now accepting nominations for the BroadwayWorld Stage Recording Awards, celebrating outstanding achievements in theatrical and performance-based recordings released during the 2025 calendar year....

Opera as a whole may be too reliant on museum pieces, on endless identikit revivals designed to secure bums on seats. But in the case of Richard Eyre’s 1994 La traviata, the old adage might be true: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it....

ENO's witty and whimsical production of Mozart's Così fan tutte will return to the London Coliseum this February with a new cast. Learn more about the upcoming production here!...

The Royal Ballet and Opera has announced its 2026 Summer Season at the Royal Opera House, featuring special programmes curated by Marianela Nuñez and Carlos Acosta....

The Royal Opera House’s Turandot has now been running so long it feels less like a revival and more like a listed structure. You don’t attend it so much as pass through it, like a familiar corridor or a particularly grand roundabout. With close to 300 performances under its belt and two runs in ...

Musically impressive with real high points, the drama does not quite hold together...

We still don’t know what Kurt Cobain did in the days before his suicide in 1994. Gus Van Sant offered one hallucinatory guess in Last Days, refashioned into opera by Oliver Leith and now revived at the Royal Ballet And Opera....

All new production images have been released from English National Opera’s HMS Pinafore, running through 7 Feb 2026 at the London Coliseum. Check out the photos here! ...

I find myself once again poised to set sail aboard the peerless HMS Pinafore, with our production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s nautical-themed masterpiece opening at the London Coliseum tonight!...

Here are all the hallmarks of any good Shakespearean comedy: love polygons, gender trouble and a shipwreck to get things going. However, in Handel’s Partenope there is one crucial difference: everyone here is self-aware....

English National Opera has released new production photos for PARTENOPE, returning to the London Coliseum from 20 November to 6 December 2025. The revival of Christopher Alden’s Olivier Award-winning staging features Nardus Williams in the title role and is conducted by Christian Curnyn....

La bohème. Glyndebourne. Three trumpeters blare out a fanfare as the chorus pours onto stage, ready to deliver the myriad vocal interjections which mark out the beginning of Act 2. But Glyndebourne is No Ordinary Opera, and this is no ordinary scene. On a single musical cue, thirty-six choristers, ...

A confession. It’s a guilty pleasure of mine to read the death notices on Wikipedia - I am my mother’s son after all and, without the columns of classifieds in the Liverpool Echo, where else is there to look?...

English National Opera (ENO) will present a new production of Jake Heggie’s opera Dead Man Walking at the London Coliseum, opening November 1, 2025. Check out photos of the production. ...

Composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and his partner Rachael Hewer eschewed making banana bread during the Covid lockdown and decided to write an opera. After the pandemic, they went on to work on other projects, but unexpectedly Glyndebourne agreed to stage their new work, which made its world premiere l...

Celebrated choreographer and director Lynne Hockney has been involved in Sir Peter Hall’s iconic version of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Glyndebourne since 2001. Now playing for the first time in the venue’s Autumn season, the production has been revived regularly since it...

Sir Peter Hall's iconic production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream has achieved legendary status since its premiere in 1981. In 2025, it has lost none of its magic, with the Glyndebourne audience still wide-eyed at the visual feast on stage....

PucciniAs the nights draw in, it seems highly appropriate to return to Glyndebourne for the start of its Autumn season and the chilly streets of Puccini’s La bohème. Floris Visser’s production, beautifully revived by Rachael Hewer, has the spectre of death ever-present. In this case, quite li...

Technically unsurpassed, but is there a chill where its soul should be?...

If you liked Evita at the Palladium, you'll like Carmen at the Coliseum...

I’m looking forward to conducting Bizet’s Carmen for English National Opera (ENO) this autumn, alongside fellow conductor, Clelia Cafiero. Carmen’s extreme drama and memorable music makes it one of the best-loved operas by audiences worldwide....

Both director and designer have slightly too many ideas about what the show could be, and what is left is unresolved potential....

It’s over 40 years since English National Opera staged Rossini's Cinderella (La Cenerentola) and they open their 2025-26 season with a vibrant new production of the sparkling comedy. After the rocky time the company has had in recent times, it is great to see them having such fun on stage....

The Royal Opera House has announced a cast change for the September 24, 2025, performance of Puccini’s Tosca. Ailyn Pérez will perform the title role in place of Aleksandra Kurzak, who has withdrawn due to illness....

If you come to opera via film musicals and, later, stage shows, Tosca is amongst the most accessible. The story of the lovers and the evil apparatchik is told at a furious pace, trauma after trauma piling up as the emotional heft becomes all but unbearable. There’s no standing about for twenty min...

Mozart's beloved comedy The Marriage of Figaro opened Glyndebourne's very first Festival in 1934 and is the renowned opera house's most performed work. No sooner has the production closed in Sussex, it reappeared in London at the BBC Proms for a super semi-staged version....

Speranza Scappucci will make her debut as Principal Guest Conductor of The Royal Opera with Verdi’s The Sicilian Vespers, opening on the Main Stage September 19 and running through October 6, 2025. ...

In the 35 years I've been going to Opera Holland Park, I've never been disappointed by the music, performances and sheer joy of being in the open air with accompanying local sound effects. The odd resident peacock squawking, planes soaring overhead, shouts from children kicking a football and dogs b...

This is a great opportunity to hear the breadth of Beethoven’s work performed in a novel way, and the drama does have its flashes of brilliance. In order to preserve these fleeting moments of conviction, though, Beethoven: I Shall Hear in Heaven needs to move away from tired biographical tropes an...

Jennifer France gives everything in a role demanding bel canto singing and bloody revenge...

It's a long way from Santiago to the West End. Isabela Díaz explains how she did it and what the Jette Parker Programme means to its artists...

Now on its third revival, Rodula Gaitanou's heart-stopping version of Verdi's tragic La Traviata is as affecting as ever. Opening with courtesan Violetta gasping for air, it never lets up its hold on the senses....

Adapted from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, director Richard Jones’s glorious Falstaff makes a welcome return to Glyndebourne, losing none of its charm or deft comedy. It is playful, witty and a pure delight....

Forget Arcadian landscapes and Corinthian columns. Oliver Mears’s new production of Handel’s Semele remoulds Greek myth to a 20th century manor house where mortals are servants of Gods who lounge around in velvet ball gowns. Semele is a maid plucked from service by master of the house, a cigaret...

You could be forgiven for thinking that there isn’t much more to be said about Le nozze di Figaro, the most performed opera in Glyndebourne’s history. However, Mozart’s classic role subversion comedy is deceptive in its simplicity: beneath the farce and improbable plot twists is a complex web ...

Le Nozze di Figaro is a piece I’ve been living with as long as I can remember. To me, it might be the best opera ever written: it makes me laugh, it moves me to tears, the plot twists still fill me with delight, and all the characters have potential for complexity and depth. It is the only piece I...

Even ardent opera fans may struggle to recall the story or the score for Mazeppa. Based on a poem by Pushkin, Tchaikovsky's opera has been unjustly overshadowed by his Eugene Onegin. Last staged at the London Coliseum in 1984, Grange Park Opera have landed a coup by engaging the English National O...

Just how much fun can you have at an oratorio about a Old Testament tale of jealousy, madness and death? Well, quite a lot as it happens at the return of Barry Kosky's remarkable production of Handel's Saul. This staging is opera at its most theatrical, with severed heads, a breast-feeding witch, a ...

Grange Park Opera has opened its new season with a crowd-pleaser. Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly remains problematic, with its story of a Japanese teenage geisha, impregnated and cruelly abandoned by an American lieutenant. However, it is still wildly popular, mainly due to its ravishing score....

Opera Holland Park has never shied away from audacious programming, and with Jonathan Dove’s Itch, it plunges boldly into radioactive territory—literally. Originally seen here in 2023 and based on Simon Mayo’s YA novel about a teenage element hunter who stumbles upon a potentially world-alteri...