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Britten: Gloriana

0 %|Jun 1, 2013|Music

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.

Featured Crew

Richard Jones
Director
Ultz
Set Designer
Mimi Jordan Sherin
Lighting Design
Lucy Burge
Choreographer
Benjamin Britten
Writer

Cast

actor
Susan Bullock
Elisabeth I
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Toby Spence
Earl of Essex
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Mark Stone
Lord Mountjoy
actor
Clive Bayley
Sir Walter Raleigh
actor
Jeremy Carpenter
Sir Robert Cecil
actor
Kate Royal
Lady Rich
actor
Patricia Bardon
Countess of Essex
actor
Brindley Sherratt
Blind Ballad-Singer
actor
Paul Daniel
Conductor