ENGLISH Touring Opera’s autumn season – Tales of the Serenissima: Baroque Opera from Venice – starts at Malvern Theatres tonight with Ulysses' Homecoming, which will be followed tomorrow by La Calisto and on Saturday with Xerxes.

The season celebrates Venice, the birthplace of opera as we know it, with a mixture of three varied Baroque operas. A great collector-state, Venice took fashions, aspirations, and artists from its trading world, and created a unique synthesis – opera, always a ‘mixed’ art, is at its most clearly mixed in Venice.

Ulysses’ Homecoming is one of only three surviving operas of the ‘father of opera’, Claudio Monteverdi. Cavalli’s Calisto, also written for Venetian audiences, was so racy that there were reports of opera-goers at the time attending in disguise so as not to be recognised. In Xerxes, Handel turned to the Venetian style to keep his audiences in London entertained with gods and satyrs, dubious heroes and attractive fools cheek by jowl.

To book, visit the box office on 01684 892277 or visit malvern-theatres.

Tomorrow at 4pm a handful of GCSE and A-Level students from Herefordshire and Worcestershire will have the chance to work with the professional singers and directors from the main stage shows. The unique workshop offers students the chance to see how the production has travelled from an original concept to the stage with the help of the designer’s model box. Students will then have a tour of the set and meet some of the cast before curtain-up on the evening of the performance. After the show, students will be invited to write reviews.

For more information email daniel.coelho@englishtouringopera.org.uk or call 020 7833 2555.

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