English Touring Opera’s partnership with Britten Pears Arts goes from strength to strength.

21 years together

Over 40,000 audience members

Upcoming performances: Spring 2024, The Rake's Progress and Manon Lescaut

In 2024, Olivier Award-winning English Touring Opera celebrates 21 years touring its accessible and exciting live opera to Snape Maltings.

This spring, they bring us The Rake’s Progress and Manon Lescaut.

Igor Stravinsky’s brilliantly inventive The Rake’s Progress charts young Tom Rakewell’s journey from unexpected riches to ruin at the hands of his own naivety, and a devilish new friend. One of Stravinsky’s crowning achievements in his pioneering career, the opera is a cynical but ultimately humanistic depiction of how the devil finds work for idle hands.

The production is led by director Polly Graham, Artistic Director of Longborough Festival Opera, with conductor Jack Sheen.

Manon Lescaut was Puccini’s first big operatic success – a dramatic and musical triumph. Based on a controversial book by the Abbé Prévost, Manon Lescaut is a devastating depiction of a woman wrestling with desire for love on her own terms, and with the rigid double standards imposed on her by society.

Jude Christian, fresh from a critically acclaimed Titus Andronicus at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, brings her incisive direction and a sharp, poetic new translation to the production. ETO Music Director Gerry Cornelius is the conductor.

Plus, Britten Pears Arts in partnership with English Touring Opera will open the 75th Aldeburgh Festival in June, with a brand new production of featured Festival musician Judith Weir’s opera: Blond Eckbert. This tale of swirling mysteries and dark secrets is a haunting parable of isolation and enigma, based on a supernatural short story by the Romantic author Ludwig Tieck.