Opera, Dance & Ballet

The dashing corsair Simon Boccanegra and Maria, daughter of the nobleman Jacopo Fiesco, have fallen in love and had an illegitimate daughter. The child has disappeared from her foster-home. Boccanegra returns to Genoa to break the news to Maria, and learns of her death as a crowd, led by the plebeian Paolo Albiani, proclaim him Doge of Genoa

Clara is given an enchanted Nutcracker doll on Christmas Eve. As midnight strikes, she creeps downstairs to find a magical adventure awaiting her and her Nutcracker.

The magician Drosselmeyer transforms the drawing room for a battle between mice and toy soldiers. During the battle, Clara saves the Nutcracker's life - so breaking a magical spell that turned him from a boy to a toy - and the Mouse King is defeated. In celebration, Drosselmeyer sweeps Clara and the Nutcracker off to the Kingdom of Sweets, where they meet the Sugar Plum Fairy and take part in a wonderful display of dances. The next morning, Clara's adventures seem to have been more than just a dream.

In Frederick Ashton’s joyous country tale, Lise and her mother clash in a foot-stomping, cabbage-throwing, battle of wills. 

The magical Christmas ballet for all the family, with exquisite dancing and Tchaikovsky’s glorious score played live.

Over 100 dancers and musicians bring Nutcracker to life.

Jonathan Miller’s classic production returns to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the director’s ENO debut.

When it premiered at Sadler’s Wells in 1995, Matthew Bourne’s triumphant modern re-interpretation of Swan Lake turned tradition upside down, and took the dance world by storm. Now firmly established as a modern day classic, this iconic production is perhaps best-known for replacing the traditional female corps de ballet with a menacing male ensemble. Sadler’s Wells Associate Artist, Matthew Bourne blends dance, humour and spectacle with extravagant, award-winning designs by Lez Brotherston, to create a provocative and powerful Swan Lake for our times.

Following his success with The Encounter at the Barbican, Simon McBurney’s five-star production of The Magic Flute returns to ENO, concerning the search for truth and reason, love and enlightenment.

Carmen is the best-known work by French composer Georges Bizet, and one of the most famous operas in the entire art form – numbers such as the Habanera and the Toreador Song have permeated the popular consciousness as little else has. The opera’s heady combination of passion, sensuality and violence initially proved too much for the stage, and it was a critical failure on its 1875 premiere. Bizet died shortly after, and never learned of the spectacular success his Carmen would achieve: the opera has been performed more than five hundred times at Covent Garden alone.

English National Ballet brings the timeless classical ballet to life in Derek Deane’s enthralling production.

Akhnaten is a mesmerising work whose text draws on ancient hymns, prayers and inscriptions sung in their original Egyptian, Hebrew and Akkadian. The opera’s unique mood will transport you to the ancient world through music that combines Glass’s characteristic minimalist voice with stylised movement and choreographed juggling to visualise the rhythms of his score.

With themes of rival families, thwarted love, unhealthy obsessions, and a doomed political marriage, Lucia di Lammermoor is Donizetti‘s most compelling romantic drama.

After a lifetime of reading books on chivalry, one eccentric old man heads off on a rumbustious quest to become a wandering knight accompanied by his faithful and equally ill-suited servant, ‘riotously performed by David Threlfall as Don Quixote and Rufus Hound as Sancho Panza’ (The Times). Taking up a lance and sword, Don Quixote sets out on a hilarious journey across medieval Spain, defending the helpless and vanquishing the wicked. 

Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary is emotionally unstable and haunted by his obsession with death. He is forced to marry Princess Stephanie. Soon afterwards his former lover Marie Larisch introduces him to a new mistress, Mary Vetsera, a young woman who shares his morbid fascination.

At the hunting lodge Mayerling, Rudolf and Mary form a suicide pact. They make love before Rudolf shoots first Mary and then himself. The royal family desperately covers up the tragedy.

Based on Oscar Wilde‘s lurid play, Strauss‘s opera is an intense psychological exploration of the Salome story. Her brutality and power are the product of the warped cycles of masculinity that have been passed down through the generations.

Kenneth MacMillan’s full-blooded ballet of love, decadence and passion.

The world premiere of Iain Bell’s Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel, following his critically-acclaimed In Parenthesis. A disadvantaged group of working-class women are drawn together in their determination to survive the murderous terror that stalks London’s Whitechapel in 1888.

A reflection on the powerful feminine symbol of Medusa, the myth and its various connotations in our contemporary life.