Carmen - NNTT

This epic opera follows Virgil, beginning as the Greeks appear to have ceded the field after ten years of the Trojan War. Cassandra tries to warn of the terrible fate to come, but fate is set and Troy falls. The first two acts cover this tragic end, then the flight of survivors to Carthage and events at Carthage continue in acts 3 - 5, culminating in the further voyage for Italy and Rome. This is Virgil's classic epic, in operatic form, in about a three and a half hour performance from French Opera.

Inspired by a fable by La Fontaine, [composer Jean-Philippe] Rameau produced perhaps his most brilliant music for his penultimate great work, blending reality and the surreal on several levels.

This is a joy from beginning to end. Although there are many tricks and ideas from Laurent Pelly, as always he seems to still retain the Offenbach magic. La Lott and Monsieur Beuron are a joy, but so is everyone else. The Patriotic Trio by the sea is both a hoot and wonderfully sung, the score seems truly complete yet never flags and the finale sequences for especially acts 1 & 2 are a joy of movement and sound fused as one glorious Offenbachian moment.

Don Giovanni was commissioned by the Prague Opera immediately after the success of The Marriage of Figaro: Mozart and Da Ponte wanted to build on their success and chose a subject that had triumphed just a few weeks earlier in Venice, a Don Giovanni composed by Giuseppe Gazzaniga. Revisiting the theme of the Seville Cheat – a prevalent subject in theatre since the mid-17th century, especially through Molière’s powerful incarnation, and in a ballet by Gluck in Vienna in 1761 – Da Ponte focused the work on the libertine character of Don Juan, no doubt drawing inspiration from his friend Casanova (who in fact helped make changes to Act 2, Scene 9, and attended the Prague première).

Meet Mignon , a shy and ingenuous young girl ignorant of her past, who will see her quest for identity upset by a terrible love triangle.

A decade before the French Revolution, in a country riven with bitter polemics, Gluck throws the history of opera into confusion by raising it to an unheard-of peak of tragic intensity. Experiencing his two Iphigenias in a single evening goes beyond the norms of operatic life: it is to enter the very heart of the curse on the family of King Atreus of Mycenae, to follow a logical destiny through a cycle of endless violence. How does the victim of Aulis become the murderess of Tauris? That is the burning question that Dmitri Tcherniakov must adress, plunging the spectator into the midst of a household haunted by the dead and setting in train an implacable process of dehumanization, with parallels to our world today. Conducting Le Concert d’Astrée, Emmanuelle Haïm drives this dual tragedy to the summit of its expressive power, leaving humanity to be translated through arias of the utmost poignancy.

In the sumptuous Art Deco setting of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Orchestre national de France performs one of the masterpieces of French Romanticism with a stellar vocal cast: Stéphanie d'Oustrac, John Irvin, Paul Gay, and Frédéric Caton.

Les Indes Galantes (The amorous indies), is an opera-ballet created by Jean Philippe Rameau in 1735. He was inspired for one of the dance by tribal Indian dances of Louisiana performed by Metchigaema chiefs, in Paris in 1723. Clément Cogitore adapts a short part of the ballet by mobilizing a group of Krump dancers, an art form born in Los Angeles black ghetto in the 1990s. Its birth occurred in the aftermath of the beating up of Rodney King and the riots, as well as police repression it triggered. Amidst this coercive atmosphere, young dancers started to embody the violent tensions of the physical, social and political body. Both the tribal dance performed in Paris in 1723, and the rebelious Krump dancers of the 1990s shape a reenactment of Rameau’s original libretto, staging young people dancing on the verge of a volcano.

Berlioz’s whimsical and nostalgic take on Shakespeare’s great comedy Much Ado About Nothing graces the stage of Glyndebourne in Laurent Pelly’s astute 2016 production. Italian maestro Antonello Manacorda leads the London Philharmonic in Berlioz’s brilliant score.

Così fan tutte, or The School for Lovers, is the last joint opera buffa by Mozart and Da Ponte. The libretto and score were written in a month in December 1789, and the premiere took place at the end of January 1790, but the death of the Emperor interrupted the run after five performances. This Neapolitan-style comedy (the action is set in Naples!), but very much inspired by French comic opera, and in particular by Femmes Vengées composed by Philidor in 1775 to a libretto by Sedaine (which was performed in Vienna), where two women wanting to teach their husbands a lesson exchange their roles by cross-dressing… in order to seduce them and confuse them better! Twenty years later, Mozart and Da Ponte found exceptional inspiration for this comedy of manners in the spirit of Marivaux, where love, beauty and cruelty are subtly intertwined, until all hell breaks loose for some anthological moments!

Step onto the stage of the Théâtre du Châtelet alongside superstar soprano Renée Fleming in Renée Fleming's Cities That Sing: Paris. Tenor Piotr Beczała and performers Axelle Fanyo and Alexandre Duhamel join an exquisite cinematic journey into the sights, sounds, and history of the City of Lights.

The Ring in Weimar enters the second round as a family saga, political thriller and search for myths. From children who plunged in the Rhine gold into a gruesomely beautiful world of norns, mermaids, dwarves, giants and gods, in "The Valkyrie" young men and women are caught up in the horrors of reality and the horror of war, whether in the family or on the battlefields, while trying to live their ideals. In "Das Rheingold" everything seemed to be palpable, the dream like the curse. In "Die Walküre" everyone and everything is under constant observation, a fascinating eye-play between great psychodrama and ancient tragedy. Siegmund and Sieglinde stir at the taboo, love is to be regulated by law and morality.

The Ring in Weimar enters its third round as a fairy tale of enlightenment and educational drama of a hero and antihero who seeks his origins and discovers his sexuality. What was meant to be a cheerful satyr play becomes a dream and trauma of re-encounters and voyages of discovery in breathtaking time lapse Wotan and Alberich can't let each other hate each other.

A ruthless dictator falls in love with a sexy woman. Together, they get rid of every obstacle in their way: his wife, her former lover, and also the voice of reason. Everything is sacrificed to passion, in this tale where evil triumphs, virtue and reason are humiliated, and nothing corresponds to our moral principles. Jan Lauwers, the director and choreographer, sets L'incoronazione di Poppea in a way congenial to his means: a visual artist, he translated the emotions expressed by Monteverdi’s music into dancing and visual images. The result was mixed; the general impression was one of many ideas, seemingly not fully developed or analysed. The stage was constantly cluttered with moving bodies, or tableau vivants, leaving a sense of confusion, and distracting from the music.

In a kingdom where day is night and noon chills the blood, a prince suspects his mysterious wife to be in love with his half-brother. But where does Mélisande come from? And what do we really know about the two heroes' silent love? A single opera was all it took for Debussy to transform the history of music forever. Opéra de Lille presents us with a Mélisande full of vitality and determination, far from the familiar ethereal figure. In the pit, François-Xavier Roth and his internationally renowned ensemble Les Siècles, playing on period instruments, lend new colours to a score which we thought we knew.

Micaela Villegas was Lima's leading theatrical lady in the 1770's when Peru was a Spanish colony. Her life was fictionalized in a one-act play by Prosper Merimee and a libretto was fashioned on which Offenbach created his opera bouffe La Perichole, reflecting the creative mania in Paris at the time for Spanish life and art. La Perichole and Piquillo, her lover and companion in misfortune, are impoverished street singers. Meanwhile the Viceroy Don Andres de Ribeira wishes to make her his lover. In music of vivacious rhythms including boleros, seguidillas and rich arias, Offenbach plays out their love against a broader social canvas.