Balls: Marin Alsop, Laura Karpman, Sandi Toksvig

Laura Karpman’s opera Balls tells the story of the Battle of the Sexes tennis match of 1973 – a decisive victory for Billie Jean King and for gender equality.

Composer Laura Karpman and conductor Marin Alsop are the perfect team to bring this turning point in the struggle for women’s rights to a 21st-century audience. Karpman, composer of many acclaimed film and game soundtracks including American Fiction, The Marvels and Kung Fu Panda 2, is a fierce advocate for equality in the film industry. Marin Alsop has blazed a trail for women conductors, through a performing career studded with ‘firsts’ and as a mentor and educator. And both know how to make music that is just as fun as it is hard-hitting.

National treasure Sandi Toksvig joins the party to perform Façade, a setting of Edith Sitwell’s poems by her protege William Walton. Some listeners at the 1923 premiere were shocked by this meeting of nonsense and nostalgia, modernism and music hall, with its poems transformed by Walton’s music into satirical hornpipes, polkas and foxtrots. But Sitwell herself declared it ‘a work for the most part of gaiety... the audience is meant to laugh.’