This exciting strand of activity connects audiences with ENO productions through imaginatively programmed talks, conversations, discussions, debates and other events.

Join us at these live events, contribute to the discussion, debate the issues.
 

Talks

Katya Kabanova
Wednesday 24 March, 5.30pm – pre-performance talk, Gavin Plumley, £4

Satyagraha

Thursday 25 March, 5.15pm – pre-performance talk, Phelim McDermott, £4

Elegy for Young Lovers
Date/time tbc – pre-performance discussion, director Fiona Shaw and Stephen Johnson, £4

Tosca
Saturday 22 May, 5.30pm – pre-performance discussion, director Catherine Malfitano and John Berry, £4

The Pearl Fishers
Sunday 4 July – post-performance discussion, director Penny Woolcock, free

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Lucia di Lammermoor

Sunday 14 February – post-performance discussion, Charles Edwards and Brigitte Reiffenstuel, free
After the performance on Sunday 14 February, set designer Charles Edwards and costume designer Brigitte Reiffenstuel talk about the way in which their designs help to conjure up an atmosphere of high Victorian hysteria.

Thursday 18 February, 5.30pm – pre-performance talk, Jonathan Keates, £4
Donizetti’s opera is based on a lurid real-life story that inspired Walter Scott to write his hugely popular novel The Bride of Lammermoor. ENO’s production plunges you straight into a stifling atmosphere of repression, family feuds and violence. Jonathan Keates, currently writing a major new biography of Donizetti, introduces the opera in a talk before the performance on Thursday 18 February.
 

The Elixir of Love

Wednesday 24 February, 5.30pm – pre-performance talk, Isabella Bywater, £4
This new production, by Jonathan Miller, finds a perfect alternative setting to the original 19th-century Italian village imagined by the composer in America’s Midwest circa 1960. Adina’s Diner is the centre of activity, the lovelorn Nemorino is the local mechanic and Doctor Dulcamara is transformed into the proverbial snake-oil salesman. Designer Isabella Bywater reveals the ways in which her ideas and imagery developed to create a new world for an old opera.

Saturday 27 February – after-show gathering, free
An informal event for first-time opera-goers to meet the company and share and discuss their experiences. Bars will be open!
 

Katya Kabanova

Wednesday 24 March, 5.30pm – pre-performance talk, Stephen Johnson, £4
Due to personal circumstances, broadcaster Stephen Johnson is unable to give our pre-performance talk on 24 March as scheduled. We are delighted that writer and Janáček specialist, Gavin Plumley has stepped in at short notice. Gavin will be talking about the composer's odd mix of life and work.  Janáček loved women. Despite his admiration for the opposite sex, his relationships were often strained. He bullied his wife throughout their married life, preferring instead an amorous correspondence with a married woman 40 years his junior. Although the Vixen in The Cunning Little Vixen and Emilia Marty in The Makropulos Case are brassy individuals, both Jenufa and Katya Kabanova are more submissive creatures. 

Elegy for Young Lovers

Date/time tbc – pre-performance discussion, director Fiona Shaw and Stephen Johnson, £4
W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, who also collaborated on Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, wrote the libretto for this exploration of the ruthlessness of artists for composer Hans Werner Henze. It’s dedicated in its turn to the great librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who wrote such subtle and penetrating texts for Richard Strauss. Director and actress Fiona Shaw talks to Stephen Johnson about the relationship between text and music.
 

Tosca

Saturday 22 May, 5.30pm – pre-performance discussion, director Catherine Malfitano and John Berry, £4
In the course of her singing career, soprano Catherine Malfitano frequently sang the title-role in Puccini’s Tosca and was greatly admired for her interpretation of this complex character, at once loving and wildly jealous, passionate and tender. She famously performed the role in a live television relay, filmed in real time in the actual Roman locations specified in the opera – the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, the Palazzo Farnese and the Castel Sant’Angelo. Now she is directing the opera herself and will talk to ENO’s Artistic Director John Berry before the performance on Saturday 22 May.
 

The Pearl Fishers

Sunday 4 July – post-performance discussion, director Penny Woolcock, free
Penny Woolcock is a film maker and opera director. She has an acute eye for detail and for the unexpectedness of human behaviour. Her UK premiere production of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic at ENO in the 2008/09 Season moved effortlessly between the large-scale and the intimate. In Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers she sees the sea as a huge, elemental force over which the people who struggle to make a living from it attempt to exert control. She discusses these ideas after the performance on Sunday 4 July.