Adriana Lecouvreur has returned to the Liceu, a title that is an authentic operone, with a great vocal score and an orchestration of high level and full of details; a very great drama, with four acts, ballet, three imposing characters and an intense dramatic conflict on a libretto with no special poetic relevance. A work with a very rare aesthetic situation given that, ascribed by the time of composition (it was premiered in 1902) to verismo, it is not about screams and stabbings...

Semiramide is arguably the greatest Rossini opera not to be regularly performed today. This does not mean, however, that it has been entirely neglected, and it was recently recorded, and performed at the BBC Proms, by Opera Rara on period instruments. Musicologist Rodolfo Celletti has suggested that ‘Semiramide was the last opera of the great Baroque tradition: the most beautiful, the most imaginative, possibly the most complete; but also, irremediably the last’. This is...

Strangely, it is the first run ever of La Donna del Lago at the Met, almost two hundred years after it received its premiere. One could argue that this operais rarely put on stage notably because it is an opera for very rare singers with natural Rossini voices able to reach every corner of a 3800 seats concert hall. However, the piece has been capitalizing some interest for the past five years thanks to two superstars who added some of the most difficult arias of this opera to their...