Credit: © NORBERT ARTNER

Two operas inspired by physics are currently playing in cities around Europe, with performances to come in the USA.

Premiered in September in Linz, Austria, Kepler is the latest work by composer Philip Glass, with a libretto by Martina Winkel. Just as other physicists have inspired earlier operas by Glass — Einstein on the Beach and Galileo Galilei — so the work of German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, who devised his laws of planetary motion in the early seventeenth century, becomes the basis of a musical exploration of the cosmos and the nature of science.

Kepler was a resident of Linz for several years, and this year the city is European Capital of Culture. Kepler the opera (pictured) is running now and through to January 2010 at the Landestheater Linz. Three extra concert performances are to be given on 18, 20 and 21 November at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, by the Bruckner Orchestra Linz, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.

Also tackling matters cosmological is Hypermusic Prologue: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes. Composed by Hèctor Parra, the libretto has been written by Harvard theoretician Lisa Randall — a collaboration born out of Randall's 2005 book, Warped Passages: Unravelling the Universe's Hidden Dimensions. Performed by solo soprano and baritone voices, the 'seven planes' of the title reference the extra dimensions of space postulated to exist beyond our three-dimensional experience, and the seven acts of the hour-long show.

Following its premier at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in the summer, Hypermusic Prologue will be performed on 27 and 28 November at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona; on 6 December as part of the Rainy Days Festival in Luxembourg; and also next year at New York's Guggenheim Museum and Brussels' Kaaitheater.