Henry Waddington

Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera HMS Pinafore is a hilarious tale of love, honour and duty. Packed with absurd characters, unforeseen plot twists and a delightfully farcical finale, Pinafore is a satirical take on the British class system and the promotion of unqualified people to positions of power. When Josephine, the daughter of Captain Corcoran, falls for the lowly sailor Ralph Rackstraw, she’s torn between her heart’s true love, and her desire to honour her father’s wish for her to marry Sir Joseph Porter, the First Lord of the Admiralty.

The lecherous Falstaff, with his infamous roving eye, finally meets his match when his underhand plans to solve money troubles have the three merry wives of Windsor conspiring to teach him a lesson. After Macbeth and Otello, Verdi breathes life into Shakespeare’s great comic character in this, his spectacular final opera. Conductor Richard Farnes makes his Garsington Opera debut in this new production directed by Prix de la critique Claude Rostand winner Bruno Ravella.

An open-air staging by Aldeburgh Music of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, on the beach that inspired the opera. A small seaside community struggles to accept a fisherman.

Recorded at Britain's Glyndebourne Opera Festival, Leos Janacek's opera follows the exploits of Emilia Marty (Anja Silja), a sexually irresistible prima donna who experiences everything imaginable in her long life, which lasts longer than 300 years. Directed by Nikolaus Lehnhoff and conducted by Andrew Davis, this psychological opera blends comedy and personal tragedy to examine the perplexing mystery of human existence.

Platée is a character whose self-deception and entrancement places her in the middle of a heartless plot, devised by the gods to cure Juno of her obsessive jealousy over Jupiter and his romantic attachments. Jupiter pretends to fall in love with Platée only to abandon her once Juno arrives, proving she has no reason to be jealous. Comedy had traditionally played little part in French opera. Lully soon eliminated comic episodes from his tragedies; from then until the appearance of this work, only a handful of operas had comic themes. That for Platée is the mock marriage between the god Jupiter and an ugly marsh nymph, who is totally convinced of her own charms.