PAST PRODUCTIONS

Encouraging us to ditch the digital and build human connection, seven up-and-coming composers & librettists told us six Birmingham stories across three stages.

"woman.life.song" by British composer Judith Weir and with text by Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Clarissa Pinkola Estes was premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2000. In 2025, we gave the piece its own special Birmingham treatment.

Michael Tippett's New Year tells the intertwining stories of Somewhere Today and Nowhere Tomorrow. Its world premiere took place in Houston, Texas in 1989, followed by a run of performances in Glyndebourne, UK in 1990. Not seen as a new production since, in 2024 Birmingham made New Year its own.

We hosted the European Opera Directing Prize in 2024. Winning director Lorenzo Ponte and team developed a production of Smetana's Two Widows in Birmingham, which then premiered in Smetana's home town in Czechia.

Four agitators are dispatched from Soviet Russia to foster revolution in pre-communist China. En route they meet a young sympathiser who offers to be their guide, but when they return to Moscow, they confess to his killing. When is it right to kill?

Wagner's RhineGold with the CBSO. Probably the largest Opera event in Summer 2021 with a full socially distanced orchestra of 87, socially distanced rehearsals and socially distanced and undistanced audiences.

Winner of the 2019 RPS Award for Opera & Music Theatre, Shostakovich's epic opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was Birmingham Opera Company's 50th production. There were five sold-out performances at the Tower Ballroom in March 2019. Directed by Graham Vick. Conducted by Alpesh Chauhan. Designed by Block9.

Is Society dead? Do you believe THIS is life? Are you ALIVE? Italy’s greatest living composer, Giorgio Battistelli, award-winning writer/activist Sarah Woods, 200 Brummies, and a cast of international stars harness the power of music - and dare to raise the dead. WAKE and witness the miracle.

A reimagining of Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas. Audiences for DnA didn't receive a ticket but had to find the top secret B4 location only with a postcode.

Michael Tippett's daring, experimental opera The Ice Break is a challenge for performers and audiences alike. The breaking ice is our family relationships, our cities, our culture, our gods our selves.

Who can save us from ourselves? For Birmingham Opera Company's first Russian opera, there was only one candidate - Mussorgsky's thrilling insight into the very nature of human motivation.

"Whenever we hear sounds we are no longer the same, and this is even more the case when we hear organized sound - music. New means change the method - new methods change the experience - new experiences change man." - Karlheinz Stockhausen

Birmingham Opera Company's 2009 'Othello' featured Ronald Samm, the first black tenor to sing the title role in the UK.

In the past 10 years alone, Birmingham Opera Company has performed in over 200 spaces: in youth centres, homeless shelters, disused factories and now the iconic Tower Ballroom in Edgbaston.

In 2007 we collaborated with The Arena di Verona to stage a production of a scale rarely seen in the UK: La Traviata in the National Indoor Arena (NIA) in front of 10,000 people.

Actions will be weighed and counted... When the time comes, pay the price. And he did...

"The show was the most exquisite, challenging and enjoyable experience I have ever had."

"What our work is trying to do is not only involve and excite audiences, it's trying to take forward and experiment and push the boundaries of the art form itself - of how we might perform it, explore it, be excited by it." - Graham Vick

"The future health of opera depends on it embracing the whole of contemporary society and that means being a part of it and being prepared to change as rapidly as society itself." - Graham Vick, 2003