RADIO 3 IN CONCERT: GLORIANA, 7PM, RADIO 3

THE audience, which included Elizabeth II, were taken aback on the opening night of Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana. The work had been commissioned to celebrate the young Queen’s Coronation, so everyone was expecting a bit of pageantry. Instead, they got a portrait of an ageing, vain Elizabeth I and her relationship with the Earl of Essex. Here, the soprano Christine Rice (pictured) plays Elizabeth I in an Engllsh National Opera production that has gone down a lot better than Gloriana did at its premiere in 1953.