From the Royal Opera House. Covent Garden, the first of six broadcasts from this year's contribution to the ambitious, long-term festival in which the Royal Opera presents all of Verdi's operas, performed over the period leading up to the centenary of the composer's death in 2001.

Verdi Il Corsaro
Written to a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, after Byron's poem The Corsair. This opera has rarely been revived in modem times and is set partly on an Aegean island and in the city of Coron at the beginning of the 19th century. Introduced by Donald Macleod and Michael Oliver, and sung in Italian.
Royal Opera Chorus, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, conductor Evelino Pido

Acts 1 and 2 8.25 Byron and Verdi
"Byron, of course, was writing an adventure poem and not a history of piracy, and he knew his audience's taste - indeed, he had created it!"
Poet Peter Porter reflects on the Byron upon which Verdi drew. and on the debt music owes to the British literary form of Romanticism.

8.45 Act 3