Angel Blue, Jacqui Dankworth

UK Premiere, sung in English with English supertitles.

Alban Berg’s Lulu has been a talking point since the composer died in 1935, leaving the third act incomplete. Of the several endings that have been written since, none has emerged as a definitive solution. Award-winning Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth looks at the entire opera afresh, with a radical reworking of the unfinished score.

Seductress, victim, manipulator: Lulu lives off men as both tortured and torturer, purveyor of ecstasy and angel of death. Caught up in greedy games and seedy schemes and with lovers driven to despair around her, Lulu makes an inexorable rise to the highest levels of power, money and fame. But her descent is just as swift. Twenty years on, as the scarred Lulu looks back on her life, she faces a squalid history of sex, murder and violence.

Neuwirth sets the action against the backdrop of the US civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, transporting audiences to the smoky jazz clubs of the Deep South.

Re-interpreting Berg’s score for a jazz-inspired ‘Las Vegas’-style ensemble, she integrates her own distinctive voice to create a sound world that casts new light on the whole opera.