Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlo, which premiered in 1867 in Paris as Don Carlos, exists in several versions, and, depending on which is performed, is either his longest or one of his longest operas. Although the first performance was in French, Nicholas Hytner’s 2008 production for the Royal Opera, which represents a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, New York and the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, employs the Modena version of 1886. This is one of several to...

Lise Davidsen makes her role debut as “Tosca” at the Bergen International Festival Ever since Lise Davidsen hit upon the world of opera in 2015, when she won not one but three major competitions - Operalia, Hans Gabor Belvedere and in her home country, the Queen Sonja Competition – she has been a singer to watch. With her youthful dramatic full-bodied soprano, she has since enchanted audiences on the world's great stages in roles such as Sieglinde in...

Following Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, which premiered in 1845, is acclaimed as Richard Wagner’s second mature opera and, set in thirteenth century Germany, tells of the eponymous minstrel-knight. Feeling that the world does not understand his art as a singer, he has fled to Venusberg where he enjoys the love of Venus. After being there for a while, however, he becomes restless and longs for his former life, and especially Elisabeth who he left behind. A...

35 years after having last appeared at Liceu, Puccini's Trittico has returned to its stage. It has done so in a 2017 Munich Opera production directed by Lotte de Beer. Achieving a visual and dramatic union in a single production of three titles as different as those that make up Il Trittico is not at all easy, the Dutch stage director half succeeds at it. De Beer takes death as a thread: in the first opera, a passionate thriller, there is a murder; in the second, a melodrama, we...

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...