Rigoletto comes back to Liceu – there will be fifteen performances and it will take the stage for the next few weeks. Verdi’s opera is presented in the same production, with Monique Wagemakers signing as stage director, as in March 2017 which was already reviewed for Opera Online. Nothing essential has changed and its virtues and flows are still present. However, it would seem that in this re-staged version, the actors’ direction and the choir’s movement...

Although German conductor and Wagner associate Hans von Bülow was being derogatory when he described Verdi’s Messa da Requiem as an ‘opera in ecclesiastical garb’ (he later retracted the remark), it is a comment that describes the inherent power and theatricality of the piece. Such a description does not, in fact, need to carry negative connotations for as Verdi’s second wife, the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, wrote, a composer must write as the texts inspire...

Jules Massenet is one of the great representative of the French Grande Opera. He has left a remarkable heritage of operas but only few have made it continously into the calendar of the opera theaters. Thaïs premiered in 1894 as one of the rarely staged masterpieces which makes it from time to time into concert halls in concert version. The composition was originally arranged for the Opera comique in Paris but was first shown in the Opera Garnier, where it had been performed the most...

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...

What a happy idea Stéphane Lissner had for his first season in reprising the last (and necessarily melancholy) production by Hugues Gall a little more than 10 years ago, when he left the Paris Opera:there is an implicit homage, and the sign of a desire for continuity in excellence.For the excellence is there, in the prodigious staging by Robert Carsen, perhaps one of his most successful:in this setting, which is an elegant mise en abyme of the Opéra Garnier, the...

The Richard Strauss Tage, a kind of festival of the Semperoper Dresden, is dedicated to the Bavarian composer Richard Strauss, who has worked for several years at the renown opera house and especially colaborated with the Saxonian Staatskapelle. It was here, that his worldwide reputation as a composer has shown his first success. Several of his operas where first performed here, his major symphonic compositions took birth here. So this year within others saw the celebration of the...