More than half of new productions by English National Opera (ENO) in the 2019-20 season will be directed by women in a season which the artistic director, Daniel Kramer, said will celebrate “the rise of the feminine”.
The company on Wednesday announced details of 10 productions, seven of them new, and three revivals, as well as plans for surtitle-free performances and early shows for people who want to get home.
Four of the new productions will be different versions of the same story, the Orpheus myth, including Offenbach’s operetta Orpheus in the Underworld directed by Emma Rice and with Sir Willard White as Jupiter.
Each will be performed in “one Rubik’s Cube transformative set”, said Kramer, representing “a way of doing more opera for less money”.
The others will be Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice directed by the choreographer Wayne McGregor and featuring 12 dancers from his company; Philip Glass’s Orphée directed by the multimedia director Netia Jones; and Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus, directed by Kramer.
The Birtwistle opera is particularly eye-catching in that it has only ever been staged once before, by the ENO in 1986. “It is one of the most talked about and obscure of late 20th-century operas and considered a masterpiece without question,” said the ENO music director, Martyn Brabbins, who will conduct.
Other new productions include Verdi’s Luisa Miller, directed by Barbora Horáková Joly, and Dvořák’s Rusalka, directed by Tatjana Gürbaca.
ENO’s three revivals in the 201920 season will be Anthony Minghella’s Madama Butterfly, Calixto Bieito’s Carmen and Jonathan Miller’s The Mikado, inspired by the Marx brothers, which has been running for more than 30 years on the Coliseum stage.
The ENO has managed to get itself on a healthier footing after years of turbulence during which it was temporarily removed from Arts Council England’s national portfolio.
One of its biggest challenges remains filling its vast 2,400-seat Coliseum space. To that end it also outlined measures it hopes will assuage some of the gripes people have about a night at the opera.
They include bringing some shows forward so they end before 10pm, helping people who need to get a train or hate getting home really late.
Another will be removing the surtitles – captions translating the text – for one show in the run of each production. That will increase pressure on singers to sing clearly, which is not always the experience.
The mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly, an ENO regular, said she did not anticipate it being a problem. “Before we had surtitles we were drilled and drilled and drilled and we will work super-hard on the nights when we don’t have surtitles. But we do any way.”
