It is Verdi country here around Busseto, where the Maestro was born, brought up and quickly returned once his career has started and he soon became a real celebrity and political symbol with his dramatic operas full of heroes and virtue. Busseto is a small sleepy town in the North of the country, in the middle of the fertile heartland of Italy, the Padana. Verdi was always proud of being a farmer and he loved to be one, which he successfully was most of his lifetime. He shared his wealth...

Liceu has opened the season with Macbeth, a title that hadn’t been featured in the theatre for more than 10 years. Musically, this Verdi opera still shows some traces of some late Bel Canto remains but also starts to announce the maturity and the personal style of the great central trilogy (Rigoletto, Traviata, Trovatore). Dramatically, it preserves and it even concentrates and thickens all of the primal violent, bloody, atavistic and barbaric theatrical strength of...

Rigoletto is one of the cornerstones of the repertory of a great opera house like the Paris Opera: you cannot, must not miss it. But at the same time you can’t simply keep repeating conventional images of it. It needs to be part of that ceaselessly shifting movement that still today makes us talk about opera, even in the case of these works from the past. In 1851, Verdi was 38 years old: Rigoletto is thus an opera from his mature period – but most of all...

Barcelona. Gran Teatre del Liceu. 12/04/2016. Verdi, Simon Boccanegra. Leo Nucci, baritone. Barbara Frittoli, soprano. Josep Bros, tenor. Vitalij Kowaljow, bass. Àngel Òdena, baritone. Damián del Castillo, baritone. Francisco Vas, tenor. Raquel Lucena, soprano. Symphonic Orchestra of Gran Teatre del Liceu. Choir of Gran Teatre del Liceu. Massimo Zanetti, conductor. José Luís Gómez, stage director. Susana Gómez, rerun of the staging....

Dark and mysterious is the start of this new production of Otello at the Easter Festival in Salzburg. Desdemona and Otello appear on the vast empty stage embracing each other till the music starts. A huge soft transparent piece of cloth is smoothly waving over the stage like a huge sail and vail. And here he is. Un angelo - the angel, an idea and addition to the cast by French director Vincent Boussard. Played by the dancer Sofia Pintzou, the angel accompanies the story throughout the...

The Bavarian state opera continues its cycle of new productions of operas by Guiseppe Verdi. After Il Trovatore, Rigoletto and La Forza del Destino, it is now Un ballo in Maschera to get its new presentation, directed by the young German Johannes Erath. Being a talented musician originally, he started later to become a director and worked with Willy Decker and Peter Konwitschny. Once more, the libretto of this fine Verdi opera is rather simple, clear and straight forward. This fast...