First Rate Revival of Andrei Serban’s Turandot at the Royal Ballet and Opera, Covent Garden

It is a special Premiere and therefore there is a prestigous mixture of VIPs in the audience of the Teatro la Fenice : politics, people from arts, fashion and design. The Venice Art Biennale, one of the biggest international art events and the Teatro la Fenice have established a joint project, selecting at every exhibition of the Biennale a young artist to direct a new opera production at La Fenice. This year, it is Vincenzo Bellini's tragic masterpiece Norma, and Kara Walker, an...

Mozart described his Così fan tutte as a dramma giocoso. The Venetian stage director, Damiano Michieletto, who debuted at Liceu with this production created for La Fenice in 2013, is interested a lot more in the dramatic or even tragic side of it, than in the giocoso element. It starts with a distorted take on Don Alfonso’s character, who turns from a “vecchio filosofo” to a cynical, embittered alcoholic who manipulates and mistreats the characters. From...

Turandot started its world-wide successful career from the stage of La Scala in Spring 1926, one and half year after the death of its author. The staging of Puccini’s last and unfinished masterpiece – hailed by a renowned study as “The End of the Great Tradition” of Italian opera – under Toscanini’s baton was a major event. La Scala’s choice to open its special season for Expo 2015 (running non-stop from May 1rst to October 31rst) strikes us...

The Maggio Musicale Fiorentino belongs to the most prestigious music Festivals in Italy with a broad variety of spectacles consisting of opera, concerts, recitals, films and accompanying venues. The international reputable maestro Zubin Metha is the musical director and a strong supporter of the troublesome Italian culture scene as well as in Valencia in Spain, where this year production of Ludwig Van Beethoven's Fidelio comes from. Florentine director Pier'Alli has created his...

Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s Król Roger (King Roger) is by any measure an operatic rarity. Written between 1918 and 1924, and enjoying a handful of outings until 1949, it was entirely neglected for the following twenty-six years. It has experienced something of a renaissance since 1975, when conductor Charles Mackerras led a performance with the New Opera Company in London, but Kasper Holten’s production still marks the first time that it has ever had an outing at...

Conductor Oksana Lyniv has entered the pit. An expectant silence has fallen over the audience. Suddenly, a ragtag group of long-haired men steps onstage. One introduces himself as the manager of the band Ciel. They’ve lost their lead singer, Ory. Have we seen him? So begins our Rossini-led romp through the 1980s. Instead of hoop skirts: leg warmers; instead of a chateau: a bowling alley. The captain of the women’s bowling team, Adele, is a pious and melancholy sort who has...