Carmen Olivia Hurton 11/10/2025This year marks Carmen’s 150th birthday. When it first premiered at the Opera-Comique in March 1875, the audience were primed...
Aida Josi Steinfeld 09/10/2025Opéra Bastille — Paris’s second opera house and a 1989 state-of-the-art building with superb acoustics — is literally crumbling. The...
Cinderella (La Cenerentola) Josi Steinfeld 29/09/2025Rossini composed La Cenerentola in just 24 days, following the triumph of Il Barbiere di Siviglia. Its premiere in Rome...
MATEO – Opera Tango Josi Steinfeld 21/09/2025In the atmospheric open-air amphitheatre of Monaco’s 14th-century Fort Antoine, Martín Palmieri’s Mateo emerged as a striking fusion of opera...
Lucia di Lammermoor Owen Davies 15/09/2025This bloodthirsty melodrama from Donizetti – a composer at the height of his considerable powers – was first staged in...
L’Italiana in Algeri Rossini Opera Festival 2025 Josi Steinfeld 05/09/2025There was already a buzz outside the Teatro Rossini before curtain-up. Fifteen minutes before the performance, an old smoking VW...
Semele Soyoon Koo 30/08/2025Handel’s Semele (1744) was met with controversy at its premiere for presenting secular opera in the guise of sacred oratorio....
Les Incrédules (The Incredulous) Thibault Elie 31/07/2025With Les Incrédules, director Samuel Achache returns to the Festival d’Avignon with his most ambitious project to date: a two-hour...
La Traviata Rivka Jacobson 25/07/2025La Traviata—a romantic-sounding Italian title that translates bluntly as ‘The Fallen Woman’—tells the story of Violetta, a high-class courtesan kept...
Lucia di Lammermoor René Weis FRSA 23/07/2025Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor was first performed at Teatro San Carlo in Naples in 1835. Since then it has been...
