Calixto Bieito, as we’ve seen from his previous shows at English National Opera, knows how to put an audience on the back foot. His nose for theatre, his desire to confound expectations, can be ...

According to the programme of this car-crash of a production of Beethoven's only opera, "Calixto Bieito's staging of Fidelio – as with all his productions – seeks to challenge our assumptions". Well ...

It is always a great pleasure to zip down the M40 to the glorious Wormsley Estate, the setting for Garsington Opera. With glorious weather, red kites wheeling in the sky and an opera house that feels ...

So there’s the thinking behind the amazing image we see before us (designer Rebecca Ringst) - a neon-edged framework of shifting metallic chambers, a vertical maze with no apparent way in or way out.

Fidelio, Beethoven's only opera, ranks for many as the greatest – the most spiritually sublime, the most emotionally intense – of all operas. But with an awkwardly melodramatic plot and vocally ...

The only shocking thing about Calixto Bieito's Fidelio, which opens ENO's autumn programme, is that it's by the same director who gave us an insightful and vigorously-realised Carmen last season. The ...

What is it? The ENO stage Beethoven’s opera; director Calixto Bieito replaces the dialogue with Jorge Luis Borges and Cormac McCarthy quotations. Edward Garner conducts. The Independent says: “In ...