Turandot, with a libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, is Giacomo Puccini’s final opera. It was left unfinished at the time of his death in 1924, and posthumously completed by Franco Alfano before premiering at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in 1926. There have subsequently been other completions of the score, most notably by Luciano Berio in 2001, but the Alfano version remains the most frequently performed, and is the one used in this instance.  Set in Peking in...

Rigoletto is one of the cornerstones of the repertory of a great opera house like the Paris Opera: you cannot, must not miss it. But at the same time you can’t simply keep repeating conventional images of it. It needs to be part of that ceaselessly shifting movement that still today makes us talk about opera, even in the case of these works from the past. In 1851, Verdi was 38 years old: Rigoletto is thus an opera from his mature period – but most of all...