Les Troyens is opera at its most epic. The sheer scale of its story, music, passion, staging and performers make this one of the great Royal Opera events of the decade. Berlioz's great work is one of the most fabulously rich of all operas, a tour de force of passion in music, with extraordinarily demanding roles for the principal cast. The story is taken from Virgil's great poem The Aeneid, and dramatizes the fall of Troy and Enee's (Aeneas') doomed affair with Didon (Dido), Queen of Carthage. It brings alive a wealth of human emotions set against the monumental canvas of the rise and fall of empires. This new production by celebrated director David McVicar (whose work for The Royal Opera includes Rigoletto, Adriana Lecouvreur and Salome) is on an impressive scale. The extraordinary world-class cast includes Bryan Hymel as the heroic Enee, Eva-Marie Westbroek (Giorgetta in Il tabarro, the title role in Anna Nicole) as his beloved Didon and Anna Caterina Antonacci (who created the role of Carmen in Francesca Zambello's production for The Royal Opera in 2006) as the doomed prophetess Cassandre, under the baton of Antonio Pappano. Designs are by Es Devlin (designer for the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympics) and Moritz Junge. With such a team, this promises to be a once-in-alifetime experience.