| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 12-Apr-2013 Barbican Theatre | Première of Michel van der Aa's Sunken Garden at the Barbican |
 What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the phrase “3D occult mystery film opera”? Because I’ll bet that whatever this makes you imagine is nothing like the reality of composer/director Michel van der Aa and librettist David Mitchell’s Sunken Garden, which debuted at the Barbican last night. That is, if “reality” is really an appropriate word for this work, which frequently pushes the term to its limits.
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| 24-Aug-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 55: ENO performs Britten's Peter Grimes on the concert stage |
 With most of the original cast of English National Opera's critically acclaimed production returning to the Royal Albert Hall to perform Britten's Peter Grimes for the BBC Proms, this was a performance of which much of the audience had high expectations. For the most part, these were met and, on occasion, exceeded.
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| 26-Jun-2012 The London Coliseum | Dr Dee at ENO |
 Fact is, they say, stranger than fiction. Damon Albarn’s latest foray onto the operatic stage certainly makes strange the true-life story of Elizabethan intellectual and philosopher John Dee. With Albarn overseeing the altercations between Elizabethan realms and forbidden mystical realms, not to mention numerous giant expanding books, Dr Dee, his latest project from on high, shapes up as theatrically stunning but musically uneven.
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| 23-Jun-2012 The London Coliseum | Dark deeds on the high seas: Billy Budd at ENO |
 For a taut drama about the relationships between men thrown together in an enclosed space, it's hard to imagine a better setting than the claustrophobic environment of a warship in Nelson's navy. Sailors worked in atrocious conditions for little pay in a life that alternated between the excitement and mortal danger of battle and long periods of intense boredom, with an ensuing myriad of petty squabbles and hatreds. Herman Melville's unfinished novella Billy Budd overlays this with a tale of crime and judgement.
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