Opera Restor’d makes a welcome return to the Festival with its new double bill of two fully staged eighteenth-century English operas.

Boyce’s youthful masterpiece Peleus and Thetis concerns Peleus’s forbidden love for the nymph Thetis and Prometheus’s role in persuading the jealous Jupiter to accept the situation. The Purcell- and Handel- influenced setting is powerful, dramatic and lyrical by turns. Pyramus and Thisbe, the play within Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was turned into a satire on opera and singers, and set by Lampe in 1745 following his Dragon of Wantley. His dead-pan Handelian music is the perfect foil to the silliness on stage: a singing, walking wall, a singing lion – even the moon on a scooter.

Fun for all the family! Opera Restor’d is renowned in Britain and abroad for its sumptuous productions of rare Baroque operas, using the forgotten techniques of eighteenth- century stagecraft.