2026 sees two new productions of Benjamin Britten’s church parable Curlew River from Pittsburgh Opera (24 January – 1 February) and the Opéra national de Lorraine (29 March – 4 April) transferring to the Opéra de Rennes (3-5 May). In France, Silvia Costa directs the new production with musical direction from Alphonse Cemin; the cast includes baritones Michael Mofidian, Stefan Loges, and Mark Stone, alongside singers from Trinity Boys Choir. In Pittsburgh the work is presented at Calvary Episcopal Church, directed by Dana Kinney and conducted by Antony Walker.
Curlew River (1964) is a 71-minute work that tells the story of a woman stricken by grief searching for her missing son. Scored for flute, horn, viola, double bass, harp, percussion, and organ, as well as a male chorus and boy treble, the 71-minute drama represented an experimental advance in Britten’s compositional technique, using short, decorative figures in solo instruments whose free repetitions are superimposed to create dynamic, unsynchronised layers. Britten and his librettist William Plomer based their scenario on Motomasa Kanze’s Noh play Sumidagawa, which Britten saw during his visit to Japan with Peter Pears in 1958.
The ‘Church Parable’ form – culminating in the creation of The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966) and The Prodigal Son (1968) – brought Noh theatre into dialogue with medieval Miracle Plays, English choral music traditions, and Britten’s attachment to the landscape of East Anglia – the titular curlew being a common sight on the marshes and reedbeds around the river Alde. In turn they would inspire Jonathan Harvey’s Passion and Resurrection (1981), a drama situated on the border between ritual and theatre, founded on liturgical texts and making extensive use of plainchant call-and-response.
The work has received over five hundred performances since its debut at the Aldeburgh Festival. It has received recent productions from Deborah Warner at the 2024 Aldeburgh Festival in Blythburgh Church (broadcast on BBC 4 and acclaimed by critics), Aleksi Barrière for the 2023 Urkuyö & Aaria Festival in Finland, Emily Hehl for Landesbühnen Sachsen, Opera Wrocławska, Opéra Dijon, and from Netia Jones in 2013 for the Britten Centenary, with Ian Bostridge and Britten Sinfonia.