As Ian Wilson’s opera, Hamelin, enters rehearsal for its Irish premiere this month, Opera Theatre Company has announced that its second new opera of the season, Jürgen Simpson’s Thwaite, has been further honoured in the Genesis Opera Project awards. Having divided the critics in London at its opening in July, Thwaite has united the Genesis Foundation in awarding the principal Opera Project Award to its creators. Simpson and librettist Simon Doyle have received a prize of Stg£10,000 ‘in acknowledgement of their originality and accomplishment with their first operatic work’. Thwaite, a dystopian view of the human need to believe, explores the baseness of much of human nature in a blackly comic and highly theatrical way. The opera is an OTC/Genesis Opera Project co-production with Almeida Aldeburgh Opera and will be performed by the London cast as part of this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival Fringe on 23 and 24 September.

OTC’s other new production, Hamelin, receives its first Irish performance in The Factory in Sligo on 6 September with further performances in Dublin and Belfast. Composed by Ian Wilson with a libretto by Forward prize nominee, Lavinia Greenlaw, the opera, which was premiered in Germany earlier this year, tells the story of the eponymous town deserted of children save one crippled girl who is prey to the machinations of the doctor and the Mayor. Hamelin is conducted by David Brophy and directed by Gavin Quinn with cast John Milne, Eugene Ginty and Natalie Reybould.