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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The grim Greek myth of the Minotaur, half-beast and half-human, has been brought to life in a new, blood-drenched opera by leading British composer Harrison Birtwistle. The 73-year-old, dubbed 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 ...

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 ...

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. SKRRRRRK. Mwarkkk. GrglBANG. Ooooooooooooh (sung, rising and falling very slowly). Xwgerk! There, you don't need to go to the Minotaur ...

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 ...

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) ...

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.