Brett Dean sets two Elizabethan women to music in a pair of works for the female voice, staged by the Royal Opera at the Linbury Theatre.
The Royal Opera stages Brett Dean’s Good Sometimes Queen, two works for the female voice, at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre in Covent Garden from Saturday 23 January 2027.
The Australian composer spent 14 years as a violist in the Berlin Philharmonic. He left at 38 to compose full time, and he writes knowing what an orchestral player will and will not enjoy being asked to do.
His opera Hamlet was first staged at Glyndebourne in 2017, and other houses have since staged it. Early-modern English material is ground he keeps returning to.
Both new pieces turn on Elizabethan women: the queen herself and the women around her. English music has worked this territory for four centuries.
The run fills the house’s January contemporary slot and ends on Friday 29 January. A week in the Linbury is the Royal Opera’s standard booking for contemporary work.
Ola Ince, who came out of the Royal Court and directs opera rarely, stages both works.