Today is the “birthday” of Billy Budd, the 54th anniversary of the premiere of the Benjamin Britten opera. To mark the occasion, the popular (?) podcast featurette “The Enigmas of La Cieca” goes international next week when a lucky listener to “Unnatural Acts of Opera” will win a pair of prime seats to the English National Opera’s acclaimed production of the opera, featuring Timothy Robinson making his role debut as Captain Vere, while “charismatic” Simon Keenlyside sings the title role and Sir John Tomlinson appears as Claggart. The performance the winner will attend is on December 14. So, all you UK parterre box fans (and anyone else who will be in the London area on the 14th), here’s what you’ll need to do to win: Listen to a special edition of “Unnatural Acts of Opera” that will become available at noon EST (17:00 GMT) on Tuesday, December 6. (You can download through Itunes or else listen to the show directly on the Unnatural Acts page.) During the show, La Cieca will ask three opera trivia questions. You’ll email your answers to the questions to [email protected] and the first received email with all three questions answered correctly will be the winner. Now, La Cieca realizes there are a lot of you listeners out there who would like to enter the contest, but you can’t make it to London on the 14th to enjoy the Grand Prize. So, just to keep the competition interesting, La Cieca is offering special prizes to the first three winning (i.e., all three questions correctly answered) entries from North America. Each of these winners will receive an historical opera DVD from the Encore collection. (La Cieca’s decisions as to winners will be hers alone, final, and subject to whim.)

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