Willard White

Disciplined Italian composer Antonio Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the hedonistic and remarkably talented young Salzburger composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

A spellbinding film of Benjamin Britten's hauntingly beautiful chamber opera, Curlew River, made to celebrates its 60th anniversary. The standout cast is led by internationally acclaimed tenor Ian Bostridge, as the Madwoman, in a performance lauded as 'heart-wrenchingly poignant', alongside the towering presence of Sir Willard White as the Abbott. Set in the ancient Fenlands of East Anglia, the parable's deeply evocative story tells of a broken woman driven to despair as she searches for her missing child along the banks of the Curlew River. This groundbreaking film interweaves live performance with filming in the Fenlands, framing the action along the hidden paths, on the waterways and under the huge skies of Suffolk's timeless landscape.

Noble Moroccan Othello finds his life with beautiful, fiercely loyal Desdemona thrown tragically out of balance when secretly jealous, scheming confidante Iago begins an insidious campaign of lies and treachery.

Headlined by Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Willard White and orchestrated by the Berlin German Symphony Orchestra, this Nativity oratorio from composer John Adams tells the magical story of the birth of Christ. Conducted by renowned maestro Kent Nagano, this moving experience draws on both Old World and New World sources to re-create this influential story, highlighted by Adams’s trademark minimalism and melody.

A major work from the remarkable partnership of playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, Mahagonny was first performed in Leipzig in 1930. Its first ever Royal Opera staging, by Associate Director of Opera John Fulljames, is sung in English, and conducted by Mark Wigglesworth – recently announced as the successor to Edward Gardner as Music Director of English National Opera. Mahagonny is a satire on money, morality and pleasure-seeking among the dubious citizens of a fictional city. The richly varied, jazz-infused score, influenced by ragtime music, includes such irresistible melodies as the ‘Alabama Song’ and many dramatic ensembles. The superb cast includes Kurt Streit as the wild lumberjack Jimmy, Christine Rice as his sweetheart Jenny, Anne Sofie von Otter in a welcome return to The Royal Opera as the cunning Leokadja Begbick, and Peter Hoare and Willard W. White as her helpers and fellow-fugitives Fatty and Moses.

The opera, inspired by Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae, is as seductive as it is topical: When Dionysus – is he a charlatan? is he a demigod? – bursts into the intact world of ancient Thebes, he plunges a city into chaos. In stark contrast to his cousin, King Pentheus, who leads a life marked by purity and asceticism, Dionysus preaches intoxicating excess and sensuality. Aware of the story’s political dimension that resonates in present day politics, Krzysztof Warlikowski brings one of his famed psychological stagings to the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg. In the gigantic three-part set of Malgorzata Szczesniak the captivating tale unfolds like a film using split-screen techniques .

A summit meeting at the Philharmonie de Paris: the Orchestre de Paris joins forces with conductor Klaus Mäkelä and soloists Sol Gabetta and Willard White for a concert dedicated to Dmitri Shostakovich and William Walton.

In the early 1900s, the fictional Catfish Row section of Charleston, South Carolina serves as home to a black fishing community. Crippled beggar Porgy, who travels about in a goat-drawn cart, loves the drug-addicted Bess, who lives with stevedore Crown, the local bully.