best opera
Gabriela Carrizo‘s production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen for the Salzburg Festival offers a radical reinterpretation of one of the most iconic works in the operatic repertoire. Known as the co-founder and artistic force behind the Brussels-based company Peeping Tom, Carrizo brings her distinctive language of physical…
The genius of Chekhov is to make comedy out of his characters, stranded in Russia’s provincial backwaters, cut off from the Moscow society they crave; seeking happiness in work, frustrated love affairs, nostalgising over their past, idealising the future. It…
Presented as a diptych in the historic performance of 1892, Iolanta and The Nutcracker are once again brought together in this Paris Opera production. In Dmitri Tcherniakov‘s staging and sets, they become one and the same work: the opera is the prelude to the…
Dmitri Tcherniakov‘s acclaimed new production of Borodin’s Russian epic—the opera’s first Met staging in nearly a century—stars Ildar Abdrazakov in the title role of the tormented prince who leads his army against the Polovtsians. The stellar all-Russian-language cast also includes…
Henry Purcell’s “Dido & Aeneas” is often described as the oldest love story in English opera. The production was a premiere for Sasha Waltz, marking the beginning of her work on “choreographic opera”. Together with 12 dancers from her ensemble…
Snegurochka (the Snow Maiden) was born in times of old in Tsar Berendey’s mythical kingdom, the fruit of the union between Spring the Beauty and Grandfather Frost. Protected by her parents from the jealousy of the Sun god Yarilo who…
What is Gandhi’s influence on the contemporary political world? This is the question explored by Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha (1980), the second in his trilogy devoted to historical figures, alongside Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Akhnaten (1984). But Satyagraha…
The titles of some operas are in themselves sufficient to capture the imagination. For the centenary of Pushkin’s birth in 1899, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov drew inspiration from one of his celebrated fairy tales and composed a delightfully imaginative opera, with the…
Rimsky-Korsakov’s grandest opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya is often labelled ‘the Russian Parsifal’. Composed in the early years of the 20th century and first performed in 1907, it betrays some musical influences…
