The U.K.'s Royal Opera has announced details of its 2014/15 season. There are seven new main-house productions including a new opera from Philip Glass, a final bow for the classic John Copley La Boheme and a welcome return for Mark Anthony Turnage's Anna Nicole.
Music director Antonio Pappano again conducts the Turnage, which depicts the glamorous but ultimately doomed life of Anna Nicole Smith. The cast is much the same as when new, Eva-Maria Westbroek in the title-role, Alan Oke as her aged husband but with Rodney Gilfry in the seedy role Gerald Finley created, The Lawyer Stern. There's a new work from Philip Glass in the Linbury Studio, The Trial - based on the famous Kafka novel - with a Christopher Hampton libretto. Another new opera, Sorens Nils Eichberg's thriller Glare, will also grace the Linbury. And the same auditorium will see the Jette Young Artists stage Rossini's rarely-heard La scala di seta.
Plácido Domingo plays Foscari the elder in Verdi's I due Foscari, a new production from Thasseus Strassberger, with Pappano in the pit and Francesco Meli in the tenor role Domingo once sang in this house. Mark Minkowski conducts another new staging, Mozart's Idomeneo (directed by Martin Kurej) with a cast including Matthew Polenzani and Sophie Bevan.
Perhaps most exciting, former Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Michael Boyd will direct Monteverdi's Orfeo, not at Covent Garden but at the highly atmospheric Roundhouse in Camden. The cast includes Susan Bickley, Gyula Orendt and Susanna Hurrell. Christian Curnyn conducts.
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