Following the hugely successful world premiere with San Francisco Opera last season, John Adams’ new opera Antony and Cleopatra receives its European premiere at Gran Teatre del Liceu on 28 October conducted by Adams himself. As an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra, as well as passages from Plutarch and Virgil, the Opera’s libretto was written by Adams with consultation by Elkhanah Pulitzer and Lucia Scheckner.

Commissioned for the centennial of the San Francisco Opera, the two-act opera is a co-commission and co-production with the Gran Teatre del Liceu and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. In the start-studded cast, Gerald Finley reprises his role as Antony, American tenor Paul Appleby returns as Caesar and Julia Bullock makes her title role debut as Cleopatra.

With the New Yorker describing the opera as ​“a finely wrought, fiercely expressive rendering” of Shakespeare’s tragedy, audience members will have six opportunities to see the production in Barcelona on 28 and 30 October, and 2, 4, 6 and 8 November.