English Touring Opera begin new era with Robin Norton-Hale at the helm

English Touring Opera’s General Director, Robin Norton-Hale, launches the ETO’s new era with an ambitious season that places innovation and excellence at the heart of the company’s work.

Norton-Hale, who assumed leadership of ETO in January this year, has introduced several key changes that will expand ETO's work. These initiatives aim to further strengthen the company's mission oftouring outstanding live productions and impactful education andcommunity projects to more towns and cities than any other UK opera company, and to make exceptional artistic experiences available to everyone.

Robin Norton-Hale, General Director of English Touring Opera,said: “The changing landscape of opera in England means that ETO’s work is more vital than ever. We want to bring the thrilling experience of opera to the widest possible audience, showing that this centuries-old but ever- evolving artform can speak to – and sing about – the world we live in now.”

Notable innovations for the forthcoming seasons include ETO Unboxed, a new programme of extra events that celebrate the multi-disciplinary nature of the artform, ambitious repertoire told from freshperspectives, specially commissioned English translations of librettos and the commissioning of new and complementary operatic works specifically for digital audiences. Additionally, there will be an expansion and integration of ETO's Learning and Participation work, with themed seasons linking its operas and other work in schools, communities and theatres alike.

ETO’s ethos has always been to produce high-quality opera for underserved audiences across the country, and under the company’s new vision the repertoire they perform will be more ambitious thanever. Autumn 2023 – the first tour to be programmed by Norton-Hale– focuses on love, power and how the two interact, with new productions of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea and Rossini’s Cinderella. Spring 2024 brings Stravinsky's The Rake’s Progress and Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, exploring the temptations of the big city and so-called immorality.

The autumn 2023 tour features an all-female creative team - Norton-Hale will direct The Coronation of Poppea, with Yshani Perinpanayagam conducting her new arrangement of Monteverdi’s score, and a punchy, poetic new English translation by Helen Eastman bringing a modern twist to one of opera’s earliest masterpieces. Cinderella will be helmed by director and movement specialist Jenny Ogilvie and conducted by Naomi Woo. Both productions will be designed by Basia Bińkowska, winner of the 2017 Linbury Prize for stage design and creator of a beautiful set forThe Little Prince at La Scala, Milan last year.

Norton-Hale said, “I am delighted to be working with such an exceptional group of women for my first season. These operas, like so many others, are driven by powerful and complex female characters – but written by male librettists and composers. These creative teams will bring new perspectives to Cinderella and Poppeafor audiences familiar with these stories, and a new way into these masterpieces for people new to them. ETO has a vital place in the opera ecology and should take a leading role in ensuring that all voices can be heard.”

All forthcoming productions will be performed in English, enhancing the immediacy of the drama for English-speaking audiences and performers, and enabling ETO to commission translations which reveal new angles on these exceptional music-dramas. Following Helen Eastman’s translation of Poppea in autumn, Jude Christian(writer and performer of Nanjing, director of Violet, Music Theatre Wales and Titus Andronicus, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse) will direct her own new translation of Manon Lescaut in spring 2024.

Tours will also be based around a central theme, bringing a greater cohesiveness to the programming and providing a point of focus foran expanded programme of fringe events around the mainstage theatre performances.

Tickets for performances of Cinderella and The Coronation of Poppea at Exeter Northcott Theatre between 8 – 11 November 2023 are on sale now via www.exeternorthcott.co.uk