Canolfan UCHELDRE Centre

Handel’s opera, with which he conquered London, comes  to the Met in David McVicar’s lively production. The world’s leading counter tenor, David Daniels, sings the title role opposite Natalie Dessay as Cleopatra. Baroque specialist Harry Bicket conducts.  

 

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Giuseppe Verdi - Opera in four acts - Sung in Italian

Plácido Domingo, one of the most celebrated talents of our time, is making a major role debut. This is a rare chance to see a genre-defining masterwork, containing some of the greatest choral music ever written, along with some wonderful arias and ensembles. This new production of Nabucco is unmissable.

Domingo takes another thrilling step into the baritone repertory following his triumphs as Simon Boccanegra, as he sings the title role of Nabucco for the first time. He is joined by an exciting young cast including Ukranian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska (Lady Macbeth in Macbeth for The Royal Opera, 2011) as the power-hungry priestess Abigaille. Acclaimed theatre and opera director Daniele Abbado makes his Royal Opera debut directing this coproductionwith La Scala, .

The plot is based on the biblical story of King Nebuchadnezzar (Nabucco), and focuses on his imprisonment of the Hebrews, his struggle against his unscrupulous daughter, Abigaille, his divine punishment and final salvation. Verdi’s rich score offers melody, powerand raw drama on a scale that does full justice to the opera’s epic themes of nationhood, faith, love and redemption and calls upon the full might of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House and Royal Opera Chorus.

Nabucco Plácido Domingo
Ismaele Andrea Caré
Zaccaria Vitalij Kowaljow
Abigaille Liudmyla Monastyrska
Fenena Marianna Pizzolato

Royal Opera Chorus - Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Conductor Nicola Luisotti
Director Daniele Abbado
Designs Alison Chitty
Lighting design Alessandro Carletti
Movement Simona Bucci
Video designs Luca Scarzella

2 hr 50 (including one interval)

We are delighted to be able to add the National Theatre’s (NT) productions to our live broadcasts programme. 

The first play to be screened will be This House, a new play by James Graham. 

It’s 1974 and the corridors of Westminster ring with the sound of infighting and backbiting as Britain’s political parties battle to change the future of the nation, whatever it takes. In this hung parliament, the ruling party holds on by a thread. Votes are won and lost by one, fist fights erupt in the bars, and ill MPs are hauled in to cast their votes.

It’s a time when a staggering number of politicians die, and age-old traditions and allegiances are thrown aside in the struggle for power. James Graham’s biting, energetic and critically-acclaimed new play strips politics down to the practical realities of those behind the scenes who roll up their sleeves, and on occasion bend the rules, to manoeuvre a diverse and conflicting chorus of MPs within the Mother of all Parliaments.

Gioachino Rossini - Opera in two acts - Sung in Italian

The ultimate bel canto cast is assembled for this important yet rarely performed masterpiece. Based on Sir Walter Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake, La donna del lago is the most fully Romantic of Rossini’s Italian operas. Expansive ensembles and shimmering orchestration generate an opulence seldom heard in the composer’s comic works.

In Renaissance Scotland, King James V travels to the tribal Highlands, where he falls in love with Elena – the lady of the lake. Her father is fighting with the clans against the King’s rule and has promised Elena’s hand in marriage to a clan leader, Rodrigo. Meanwhile Elena herself is in love with the young romantic hero Malcolm. The plot inspired some truly galvanizing scenes, most memorably the stunning confrontation between the tenors Uberto (James V in disguise) and Rodrigo.

John Fulljames’s staging evokes the exoticized mystery of Rossini’s Romantic landscape, and provides an insight into this rich but under-explored seam of operatic gold. In the hands of three of the leading bel canto voices of our time, Juan Diego Flórez (Count Almaviva in The Royal Opera’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, Tonio in The Royal Opera’s La Fille du régiment), Joyce DiDonato (who sang the title role in Cendrillon with The Royal Opera last Season), and Colin Lee (Tonio in the 2012 revival of La Fille du régiment), La donna del lago promises to be a musical revelation.

Elena Joyce DiDonato
Uberto (James V) Juan Diego Flórez
Malcolm Daniela Barcellona
Douglas Simón Orfila
Rodrigo Colin Lee
Royal Opera Chorus - Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Conductor Michele Mariotti
Director John Fulljames
Set designs Dick Bird
Costume designs Yannis Thavoris
Lighting design Bruno Poet

3hr 20 (including one interval)

Live.  Sung in German with English surtitles.

We are delighted to add the 2013 Glyndebourne Festival to our opera broadcast programme.

The season opens with a new production of this compelling and intricately crafted collaboration between composer Richard Strauss and writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal. After the enormous success of Der Rosenkavalier, the two men conceived the idea of a light entertainment, a small trifle to amuse and divert the public.

In the second of our National Theatre Live broadcasts, Helen Mirren reprises her Academy Award winning role as Queen Elizabeth II in the highly-anticipated West End production of The Audience.

For sixty years Elizabeth II has met each of her twelve Prime Ministers in a weekly audience at Buckingham Palace – a meeting like no other in British public life – it is private. Both parties have an unspoken agreement never to repeat what is said. Not even to their spouses.

The Audience breaks this contract of silence – and imagines a series of pivotal meetings between the Downing Street incumbents and their Queen. From Churchill to Cameron, each Prime Minister has used these private conversations as a sounding board and a confessional – sometimes intimate, sometimes explosive.

From young mother to grandmother, these private audiences chart the arc of the second Elizabethan Age. Politicians come and go through the revolving door of electoral politics, while she remains constant, waiting to welcome her next Prime Minister.

The Audience reunites writer Peter Morgan and Academy Award-winning actress Helen Mirren following their collaboration on the critically-acclaimed movie sensation The Queen.

The Audience is directed by Academy Award-nominated director Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours) and presented in the West End by Matthew Byam Shaw for Playful Productions, Robert Fox and Andy Harries.

The second opera from Glyndebourne is an Encore from a live performance in June 2009.

Sung in Italian with English surtitles.

Throughout his long career, Verdi longed to find a good subject for a comic opera. Towards the very end of it he found that subject, in the vast and jovial shape of Shakespeare’s John Falstaff.

Captured live in July 2012. Sung in Italian with English surtitles.

Michael Grandage’s production of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro returns. The opera has particular significance, as it was the first ever to be performed at Glyndebourne in 1934, with festival co-founder Audrey Mildmay in the role of Susanna.

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Live. Sung in French with English surtitles.

When Rameau died in 1764, the Mercure de France concluded its obituary with the words “Here lies the God of Harmony.” In many ways he defined 18th-century French music, publishing his widely influential Treaty on Harmony in 1722. Hippolyte et Aricie was Rameau’s first work for the stage, written when he was nearly 50. It is also Glyndebourne’s first production of an opera by Rameau, and will strike audiences, as it did in Paris in 1733, with its richness of invention.

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Live. Sung in Italian with English surtitles.

Donizetti was an enormously prolific composer. Don Pasquale is the 64th of his 66 operas, and was written only a year before the onset of the syphilis-induced dementia that was eventually to overwhelm him. Given the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the diamond-bright wit and brilliance of this opera also has a distinctly dark side. Danielle de Niese, who is acknowledged as one of the world’s most talented and charismatic artists and has been described as “the world’s coolest soprano” by the New York Times, performs the role of Norina.

Captured live in August 2010. Sung in English with English surtitles.

This year marks the centenary of Benjamin Britten, who was born on 22 November – the feast day of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of music. His powerfully dramatic Billy Budd returns to Glyndebourne, with Jacques Imbrailo in the title role and Sir Mark Elder conducting.

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