Sinous and seductive: Danielle de Niese will play Galatea at the Royal Opera House in March. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Antonio Pappano, music director of the Royal Opera House, has said that the 2008-9 season is to be all about expanding the repertoire. "The popular usual-suspect operas will always be our bread and butter. But this year our mission is to go further," he said. As the ROH announces it is to raise its top seat prices to make other tickets cheaper, most exciting in the new repertoire, perhaps, is the arrival in January of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's 1920 work Die Tote Stadt. This expressionistic opera, largely told in dream-sequence, will receive its fully staged UK premiere in a production Willy Decker made for Salzburg in 2004. It will be conducted by the impressively skilled Ingo Metzmacher in his house debut.
Another treat will surely be the double bill of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Handel's Acis and Galatea from March - classics never before seen on the Royal Opera House stage - directed by the Royal Ballet's resident choreographer, Wayne MacGregor. The last time the ballet and opera companies came together was in a production of Tippett's Midsummer Marriage in the mid-1990s; this will certainly be one to see. MacGregor's productions will naturally be suffused with dance: good idea, then, to cast the sinuous soprano Danielle de Niese as Galatea, who so impressed Glyndebourne audiences a couple of years ago with her nifty dance moves in Handel's Giulio Cesare.
Christof Loy, longtime collaborator of Pappano, will direct a new Lulu in June; Loy made the slick, expensive-looking Ariadne auf Naxos with which Pappano started his tenure at the house. At the moment, there is no soprano in place to take this most demanding of title roles - an unnamed singer has already withdrawn. Productions of Berg's Lulu are always an event, but much will rest on who will take the lead.
In February, Bryn Terfel is to have a production of Der Fliegende Holländer built around him by Tim Albery, a role in which the Welsh baritone revels. And director David Alden is to create his first production ever for the Royal Opera House, in September: Cavalli's rarely performed La Calisto.
