Britten’s Gloriana starring Anna Caterina Antonacci and Leonardo Capalbo is now available for streaming from BBC Radio 3.

From the BBC: 

“Gloriana by Benjamin Britten was written for the year long celebrations of Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953. As the nation celebrated the glamorous young queen, promising a new age of peace, Britten produced an opera strangely at odds with the time, but always in tune with his own sensibilities.

Britten takes the stormy personal relationship between a mature Elizabeth I and a young attractive Earl of Essex as related in Lytton Strachey's "Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History" , and gives us a complex portrait of an older woman, who as Queen and last surviving child of Henry VIII, knows only too well what it takes to run a country, and ultimately what personal sacrifices to make, despite her own emotions, to protect her authority.”