For the third year in a row, the English National Opera have won the Southbank Show Award in the opera category. 
This time the award was given for David Alden's critically acclaimed sell-out production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes. The previous two wins were for their joint production of Lost Highyway and Punch & Judy with The Young Vic, and also for David McVicar's controversial, but well received production of Britten's The Turn of the Screw.
Proving that once again that the ENO are Britain's most innovative and risk-taking opera company, the award is a welcome sign of the positive changes which are shaping an institution, which in the not too distant past, was racked by inward political instability as well as a lack of musical direction. Commenting on the win, the ENO Artistic Director John Berry said:
‘Winning this award for Peter Grimes highlights how ENO’s creative influence both in the UK and overseas has gained pace over the last three seasons. We have brought together an incredible creative team for this production co-produced with De Vlaamse Opera, Opera de Oviedo and Deutsche Oper Berlin. It is a tribute to David Alden’s visionary talent, Edward Gardner’s superb conducting, and spellbinding performances by the cast and ENO’s Orchestra and Chorus’.
Whilst the occasional effort may indeed mis-fire, it is only right that the ENO should showcase innovative stagings of operas which rarely take centre stage at The Royal Opera. David Alden is back very shortly with his lauded production of Donizetti's bel canto jewel, Lucia di Lammermoor, providing audiences with an opportunity to see a production that is both dramatically cohesive and musically taut.
With the talented Edward Gardner going from strenght to strength, It seems that all is going rather well in St Martin's Lane.
Antony Lias
Opera Britannia
invited to join composer Anna Meredith, sound designer Sam Godin and the classically trained Indian singer Falu, in an evening where they can record Satyagraha-inspired loops that will form part of the “Remix”. 
even as warmly as they did to Thomas Adès’ The Tempest. Both these works were broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, and each of these broadcasts has been cleaned up and recently issued on double CD (Adès on EMI, 2009; MacMillan on Chandos, 2010). Both operas also have composers who enjoy successful careers as conductors, but while Adès conducted The Royal Opera House forces at Covent Garden, it was unfortunate that on the night when The Sacrifice was broadcast from the Wales Millennium Theatre with Welsh National Opera, MacMillan was unwell and was therefore forced to hand over the reins to Anthony Negus.
of recession by the magnificent margin of point squit of a zillionth, it was nice actually to encounter something quite so uncomplicatedly positive as her recital. Opera singers, in the up-close and personal context of a recital room, fall into extremely contrasting categories, ranging from the all-singing, all-dancing Ethel Merman-esque firecrackers (Cecilia Bartoli) to the half-barmy and catatonic (um, better exercise some discretion here, I suppose) by way of sassy, sweet ‘n simple, straightforward or sepulchral, the raunchy or the reverential, the bullish or the businesslike. 
Covent Garden, the Metropolitan and, as preserved on this DVD, the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, each of the original directors was no longer around to supervise his show's latest outing. This matters less, of course, in stagings that cleave close to the scenic and theatrical givens of the work as conceived by Hofmannsthal and Strauss in microscopic detail, than in ones like that under consideration here that avail themselves of varying degrees of liberty and licence.
