As this year marks the centenary of Giacomo Puccini's death, it is safe to say that his operas are ageing well, based on the box office figures. This is probably due to both musical and dramatic factors. On the one hand, the expressive musical resources employed by the composer, without preparation or preamble, always stepping on the emotional accelerator and seeking impact, place his procedures in a terrain very close to that of mid-20th century film music. In fact, we could say that...

Anna Pirozzi's inexhaustible forza and accuracy, stylistic appropriateness and the beauty of her singing were the main reasons for the success of the premiere of La Forza del destino at Liceu. Nicola Luisotti's great musical direction and the magnificent singing of Brian Jagde and Artur Ruciński were also very important, but it was the Neapolitan soprano's performance that brought the audience to its feet at the end. With three highly demanding arias, a duet with the tenor...

As the year commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich's death approaches, smart theatres are preparing new productions of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the composer's second, last and most famous opera, with the idea of renting it out to other theatres and thus recouping their investment. Beyond its many musical and dramatic merits, this opera, one of the finest of the 20th century, is - unfortunately - known for the fact that Stalin disliked it and...

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...

La Cenerentola, even more than Il Barbiere di Siviglia, is the true encyclopaedia of Rossinian singing which, in a barbarically summarized form, could be defined as a singing that must be easy, fluid, light, but in no way inconsistent; a line full of high notes to which the interpreter should never arrive puffing, exhausted, strangled and at the limit of their strength after a risky climb, but should fly over it elegantly and lightly, taking advantage of the fact that Rossini never forces...

The opera Orgia, for three voices and chamber orchestra, with music by Hèctor Parra and libretto by Calixto Bieito, which had its world premiere at the Teatro Arriaga in Bilbao in June 2023, has now arrived at the Liceu in Barcelona. Orgia, of which only two performances will be offered in Barcelona, is based on the play of the same name by Pier Paolo Pasolini, which was premiered -some say not very successfully- in Turin in 1968. Bieito's libretto has reduced the theatrical...