The Royal Opera which received its Royal Charter in 1968 as “a fitting tribute to a company which, from modest beginnings in 1947 as the Covent Garden Opera Company, had in the course of two decades achieved international status and acclaim". It resides in the Royal Opera House, the third theatre built on the Covent Garden site because both the previous theatres were destroyed by fire. The present theatre, opened originally in 1858, re-opened in 2000, after three years of major development, with the theatre utterly transformed. Brand new technical and rehearsal facilities were built; a smaller auditorium, the Linbury Studio, was created for smaller and more experimental productions, where a number of PMF funded productions by companies like The Opera Group have been staged.

PMF involvement:

1991 Birtwistle’s Gawain. Peter Moores Foundation helped fund the television recording by BBC and the CD of the opera released by Collins Classics in 1996.
1994 Rossini's Mosè in Egitto
2000 Rossini’s Otello
2002 Verdi's I masnadieri 2002 Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux. Peter Moores Foundation funded the recording by Opera Rara.
2005 Donizetti’s Dom Sebastien, roi de Portugal. Peter Moores Foundation funded the recording by Opera Rara.
2008 Rossini’s Mathilde di Shabran, a production first staged at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro, 2004. 
Rossini's Otello

The Guardian

'Rossini's Otello is an opera with a notorious reputation... the opera is twaddle when put beside Verdi's much later version; and it requires no fewer than three star tenors... all of whom have to sing some of the most impossibly gruelling music ever written. The revelation of The Royal Opera's new production, however, is that most of the charges flung at the opera are erroneous. Shakespeare is not so much travestied as cogently distilled along neoclassical lines...

As for the three tenors, Covent Garden has unquestionably found them - and boy can they sing. Rossini lets his Otello seduce, enchant and rave over the fearsome extreme of two-and-a-half octaves. Bruce Ford negotiates this terrifying range with consummate ease and minimal showiness... Juan Diego Florez is cast as Rodrigo... The tessitura is implacably high, the coloratura treacherous. Florez spins it out with a staggering perfection of tone. Octavio Arevalo's Iago completes the triumvirate. Hearing this trio in action is imperative.'

The Times

‘Even Rossini enthusiasts admit that not all the music in the earlier acts shows him at his best, though this aristocrat among composers was incapable of writing notes that were less than graceful and civilised in the broadest sense. But the good bits are very good indeed, with many a pointer to later operas - the Otello-Iago letter duet is Rigoletto's Vendetta in more than embryo - and the third act is top-drawer Rossini throughout. I would argue that his treatment of Desdemona's Willow Song is far more imaginative than Verdi's. So Rossini's Otello needs doing, occasionally, and I cannot imagine it being better done than it is by the Royal Opera. It has sensibly borrowed Pier Luigi Pizzi's handsome production from Pesaro: Renaissance sets and costumes, discreet "operatic" direction - this Rossini would not repay deconstruction. And given that the Naples company for whom Rossini wrote it in 1816 had more tenors on the roster than you could shake a stick at - you need five! - they have assembled a dream cast.

Bruce Ford has made the enigmatic title role his own. It is enigmatic in that it almost sounds as if you need a baritone (it goes very low), but one who can fling off top Cs as well. All this Ford can do with ease, and he was in exceptionally warm, strong voice on Monday. Rodrigo is a more conventional Rossini tenor role - ie, high and florid - and Ford's Pesaro colleague Juan Diego Flórez was simply sensational, every note in even the most intricate piece of coloratura knitting securely voiced. These two hurling defiance and top notes at each other is the stuff of which opera is made, or used to be. Mariella Devia is an impeccable stylist and technician with a most beautiful voice: her Desdemona was one long, limpid stream of vocal delight. And so on: the tenor Octavio Arévalo turned Iago into a major role through sheer gumption and a bass of Alastair Miles's stature was engaged for the small role of Desdemona's father: he was superb. Timothy Robinson sang the Gondolier's offstage song with Rossinian grace. The wise, unobtrusive conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti gave his singers every support while granting the score its full dramatic weight. A great evening.'
Rossini’s Matilde di Shabran

Evening Standard

‘The sexual psychology of Rossini’s Matilde di Shabran is not complicated. “Women should be banned,” proclaims the tyrant-hero at the start. “Women are born to conquer and to reign,” concludes his fiery eponymous lover at the finale. Take your pick. Neither would stand up in a court of law. The journey towards that end is long, complicated and, as always with Rossini, saved by the most rewarding ensembles and glittering aural pyrotechnics ever detonated by the human voice. When the star is Juan Diego Florez, for whom Italian bel canto is life’s elixir, we are sure of a treat. His Matilde, Polish soprano Aleksandra Kurzak, was if anything yet more outstanding. She floated, sparkled and spat her ferocious ornamented passages. Top notes shot out like flick-knives. You wouldn’t want to meet her coloratura on a dark night.’

The Sunday Times

‘Four years ago in Pesaro, Matilde di Shabran was a dazzling discovery for me. I raved almost unreservedly about the musical performance and praised Mario Martone’s production for balancing the comic and serious elements of the piece. Florez’s technical bravura remains staggering. To my surprise, he wasn’t the star of the show. That accolade goes to the ever-improving Polish soprano Aleksandra Kurzak, who had the audience eating out of her hand with her pearly coloratura and coquettish charm. Her show-off final aria matches that of La Cenerentola in its brilliance, and she rightly brought the house down. Carlo Rizzi kept Rossini’s inventive and vivacious score on the boil... The work is a musical treasure-trove, and Kurzak is a dazzling new star.’