There’s long been a hue and cry to call The Emperor’s New Clothes on Harrison Birtwistle’s music. I am disinclined to join this effort to debunk: one must respect and admire a composer of such ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. Harrison Birtwistle’s large-scale operas have not travelled a great deal, so it is good that his Gawain will be ...

LONDON — LONDON: The earliest opera composers looked to Greek myths for the substance of their operas. Four hundred years later, the British composer Harrison Birtwistle obviously thinks they knew ...

Less sympathy is extended to Ariadne, the Minotaur's bored gate-keeper. Her efforts to secure herself a one-way ticket off Crete by eloping with Theseus - who appears on the island with several fellow ...

A clip from the Royal Opera House production of The Minotaur, a story about a half-bull, half-man, imprisoned in a labyrinth on the island of Crete. Each year young women and young men are sacrificed ...

In Ovid’s Metamorphosis the story of Theseus and the Minotaur only takes up 30 lines or so. Since then, however, it has been retold many times: from Dante’s half-man half-bull described as the ...

Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra – a work he called a cantata but which is more like sung psychodrama – uses the poet Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine’s Phèdre to explore the fallout from the character ...

Whenever a new work comes to the Royal Opera House stage, thoughts tend to focus on the simple question of whether it is a hit or a miss. The general consensus in 2008 was that Sir Harrison Birtwistle ...

Well I suppose the answer must be a strong and well-paced plot and enough variation in the music to keep the audience gripped. On both of those counts, Harrison Birtwhistle's retelling of the Greek ...

In addition to the monster of Greek myth with its insatiable appetite for humans, there is a band of blood-spattered harpies with rattling wings that gorge themselves on the Minotaur’s leftovers.

The Minotaur, Royal Opera House, London on facebook (opens in a new window) The Minotaur, Royal Opera House, London on linkedin (opens in a new window) ...