Brett Nicholas Brown is an opera director and librettist whose work is shaped by the reinterpretation of historical repertoire and the development of new opera.
Recent Work
Pelopida
Girolamo Abos (1747)
Teatru Manoel | Valletta Baroque Festival
Conductor Giulio Prandi with the Arianna Art Ensemble
The first modern revival of Pelopida (1747) by Girolamo Abos, directed by Brett Nicholas Brown for the Valletta Baroque Festival.
Ancient Thebes was reimagined as a contemporary sculpture museum, allowing the opera’s political and emotional conflicts to unfold in a space shaped by memory and curated history. Reconstructed from manuscript sources and developed in collaboration with an international creative team, the project reflects a broader commitment to the reintroduction of neglected opera seria repertoire to the modern stage.
Il Parnaso Confuso & La Corona
Christoph Willibald Gluck (1765)
Teatru Manoel | Valletta Early Opera Festival
Conductors Giulio Prandi & Giacomo Biagi with the Arianna Art Ensemble
A new staging of Il Parnaso Confuso and La Corona (1765) by Christoph Willibald Gluck, directed by Brett Nicholas Brown for the Valletta Early Opera Festival.
The action was transposed from ancient Greece to a single manor house, with Il Parnaso Confuso situated in the 1920s and La Corona in the 1940s. This framing allowed the two works to exist within a shared dramatic world, reflecting distinct historical moments.
The production established a cohesive visual and dramaturgical language, maintaining close engagement with the musical and dramatic structures of the works while recontextualising their narratives for contemporary audiences.
A New Opera (in development)
Composer: David Coleman
Libretto: Brett Nicholas Brown
A full-scale opera currently in advanced stages of development.
The work explores a contemporary re-examination of the late 19th-century verismo tradition, engaging with its musical language and dramatic intensity while developing a new dramaturgical framework.
Aer et Aqua
Composer: David Coleman
Libretto: Brett Nicholas Brown
An orchestral and choral composition exploring elemental forces, with a Latin text developed through an integrated process of text and music.
Povestea Catalinei (Catalina’s Story)
After Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron
National Theatre of Romania
Written and Directed by Brett Nicholas Brown
A devised work written and directed for the National Theatre of Romania, based on a story from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and performed in Romanian.
Presented as an internationally live-streamed production, the project explored the adaptation of historical narrative within a contemporary digital performance context.