There will be a heavy contemporary focus in English National Opera’s 2011-12 season, including a new production of John Adam’s The Death of Klinghoffer and a work by Damon Albarn, as well as a new partnership with Hampstead Theatre.

Adam’s opera about the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro liner by terrorists and the killing of one of its passengers will be directed by Tom Morris, whose recent credits include a dramatic production of Michael Morpurgo’s World War One story War Horse. Alan Opie will play Klinghoffer.

Other contemporary operas to feature in the season - which was unveiled by the company, based at London's Coliseum, yesterday - include Caligula, by Detlev Glanert, and Jakob Lenz by fellow German composer Wolfgang Rihm, the latter being staged at Hampstead Theatre.

There is just the one Baroque production this year, though it turns out to be the first Rameau opera to grace the ENO stage. Castor and Pollux will be directed by Barrie Kosky and conducted by Christian Curnyn. Other new productions include The Marriage of Figaro, directed by Fiona Shaw and conducted by Paul Daniel; Eugene Onegin, in a new production by Deborah Warner; The Tales of Hoffmann directed by Richard Jones; and the Flying Dutchman, directed by Jonathan Kent. Music director Edward Gardner conducts the Wagner opera, as well as a new production of Billy Budd, pairing up again with director David Alden in a follow-up to their recent Peter Grimes for ENO.

Doctor Dee, by Blur and Gorillaz musician Damon Albarn, will explore the life of Elizabethan scholar John Dee. Directed by Rufus Norris, it will already have been seen at the Manchester International Festival before it arrives at the Coliseum, and follows Albarn’s 2007 work Monkey: Journey to the West, which had made its London visit to the Royal Opera House and the O2 arena.

Other productions include the UK premiere of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The Passenger, a work about the Nazi Holocaust. Directed by David Poutney, the production was first staged at the Bregenz Festival. For full details of the season, visit the ENO website.