Tales of Love and Loss is not the name of one specific opera, but rather the title given to this triple bill in which all three works have been composed by women. It constitutes a Jette Parker Artist production, meaning the cast and creatives are drawn from the Royal Ballet and Opera’s programme to develop up-and-coming talent, and it is presented in the venue’s smaller Linbury Theatre to celebrate the scheme’s twenty-fifth anniversary. While the parallels can be...

The Turn of the Screw is a 1954 chamber opera by Benjamin Britten, with Myfanwy Piper’s libretto being based on Henry James’s eponymous novella of 1898. Told across a Prologue and sixteen scenes, with each of these being preceded by a variation on the twelve-note ‘Screw’ theme, it has been described as one of the most dramatically appealing of all English operas. Set in an English country house in Bly, originally in the middle of the nineteenth century, it tells...

Last Days, by composer Oliver Leith and librettist Matt Copson, is based on Gus Van Sant’s eponymous film of 2005. In 1994 Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of rock band Nirvana, took his own life. Van Sant’s film is not strictly the story of Cobain’s demise, but, by focusing on a fictitious musician named Blake, it tries to imagine what he might have gone through in his final three days, which still remain something of a mystery. Van Sant initially thought that the film might...

George Frideric Handel’s Giustino, HWV 37 has an Italian language libretto, the origins of which lie in one created by Nicolò Beregan in 1682. That was first set to music by Giovanni Legrenzi the following year, and was subsequently used by Tomaso Albinoni in 1711 (though his opera is now lost) and Antonio Vivaldi in 1724. The version that Handel used had been adapted from Beregan by Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI’s court poet Pietro Pariati in 1711.  The opera...

Although Georg Philipp Telemann is acclaimed as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and one of the most prolific ever in terms of volume of output, his operas have been somewhat neglected. This performance of Pimpinone, or, to give it its full title, Die Ungleiche Heirat zwischen Vespetta und Pimpinone oder Das herrsch-süchtige Camer Mägden (The Unequal Marriage Between Vespetta and Pimpinone or The Domineering Chambermaid), represents the first time that Covent Garden...

Written in 1975 and first performed by Dame Janet Baker at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1976, Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra was his final vocal work. He assembled the libretto from parts of a translation by Robert Lowell of Jean Racine’s 1677 play Phèdre, and the cantata sees the eponymous woman contemplate her death as things have completely fallen apart with her husband Theseus. This is due to her lust for his son and her stepson Hippolytus, who has died as an indirect...