Carried out at Madrid's historic Teatro Actual in 2018, Ivor Bolton conducts Benjamin Britten's opera primarily based on Lytton Strachey's 1928 Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic Historical past. In her repeated clashes with the Earl of Essex-a longtime favourite of the queen who was finally put to loss of life for treason-Elizabeth I is depicted as flawed and useless, human and sympathetic.
