Cosmicly Cheap Holidays

St Martin’s Lane, WC2 (box office 020 7632 8300/ fax credit card bookings 020 7379 1264/minicom 020 7836 7666)

Leicester Square tube or Charing Cross tube/rail. Box office 24 hours daily. Tickets ?2.50-?55; day tickets on sale to personal callers after 10am Mon-Sat and over the phone from 2.30pm Mon-Sat. Credit AmEx, DC, MC, ?TC, V.

Website: http://www.eno.org

The grandly named and grandly proportioned Coliseum is the home of the English National Opera ,
the matey cousin to the noticeably more stuffy Royal Opera. ENO, which
hands over the Coliseum to ballet companies during the Christmas and
summer seasons, likes to think of itself as an approachable, slightly
populist company. To a large extent it’s entitled to: in the past,
ticket prices have tended to be considerably lower than the ROH’s,
while the productions could be considered more challenging than those
at Covent Garden (although, now the new ROH has been unveiled, this
distinction may be lost), and all the works are sung in English. In
recent years, ENO has knocked out some fine productions in a return to
the form that made it so popular in the 1980s. As part of the London String of Pearls Millennium Festival ,
ENO is celebrating 400 years of opera with an ambitious run of ten
consecutive new productions (Sept-Dec 2000), starting with Monteverdi’s
The Coronation of Poppea and concluding with Verdi’s Requiem .