Britten: Gloriana

Overview

Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana was written in 1953 for celebrations around the Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, to whom the opera is dedicated. It had its first performance at the Royal Opera House on 8 June 1953, in the presence of The Queen then just 6 days into her reign. The centenary in 2013 of Britten’s birth prompted this new Royal Opera production, in which director Richard Jones uses the setting of a celebratory pageant in 1953 to explore the work’s alternating splendour and intimacy. This theatrical, inventive and colourful staging has at its core the symbolic reflections between the Tudor Elizabethan and the New Elizabethan ages that characterize the opera. The juxtaposition of the modern and the archaic in William Plomer’s libretto is wonderfully amplified in music that artfully fuses the sounds and manners of Tudor England – from lute songs to courtly dances – with Britten’s own distinctive style.

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Cast

Susan Bullock

Elisabeth I

Toby Spence

Earl of Essex

Mark Stone

Lord Mountjoy

Clive Bayley

Sir Walter Raleigh

Jeremy Carpenter

Sir Robert Cecil

Kate Royal

Lady Rich

Patricia Bardon

Countess of Essex

Brindley Sherratt

Blind Ballad-Singer

Paul Daniel

Conductor