Orgia: Parra and Bieito Recreate Pasolini

Three artists who integrated the “excess” in their art or in their lives, together with the renaissance goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, providing the character and the subject, the composer Hector Berlioz bringing the music, and Terry Gilliam, film and stage director, on the staging are the parents of the spectacular and captivating production that is taking place at Liceu and which most probably will be the big event of the season. The vigorous start with a...

The first premiere of the new season of the Bavarian State Opera is a historical premiere too. First time Arrigo Boito's opera Mefistofele on stage here. Arrigo Boito is one of the glamorous artists of Italy in the last 19th century. Educated in music, he was a literary, a librettist and a composer, but also a political and philosophical active person too. As a founding member of the avant-garde artist group "I Scapigliatura", the tousled - he represented the newly found...

The Richard Strauss Tage, a kind of festival of the Semperoper Dresden, is dedicated to the Bavarian composer Richard Strauss, who has worked for several years at the renown opera house and especially colaborated with the Saxonian Staatskapelle. It was here, that his worldwide reputation as a composer has shown his first success. Several of his operas where first performed here, his major symphonic compositions took birth here. So this year within others saw the celebration of the...

What a story, what a character Richard Strauss and his co-genius Hugo von Hoffmannsthal have created here at the beginning of the 20th century. The expressive music and the female wild brutality were shocking and affecting the audience at the same time. Elektra, full of grieve, is seeking for revenge for her beloved father's death, accusing her mother and stepfather, exposing herself in front of the palace as a living monument of self destruction, desire up to mentally defection and...

The creation of Ariadne auf Naxos originally led to a novelty in music history. It was the desire to support the work of their friend Max Reinhardt that Richard Strauss and his genius librettist Hugo von Hoffmannsthal brought the intention to combine a play with a lyric opera in one piece. So, they brought together the drama by Jean Baptiste Molière Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, enriched with ballett music and the Greek tragic story of the unhappy love of Ariadne, liberated by the god...

Based on Prosper Mérimée’s eponymous novella, Georges Bizet’s Carmen of 1875 is the story of the ultimate temptress. A gypsy girl and cigarette factory worker in Seville, Carmen has the power to entice any man she chooses. Once, however, they are besotted with her she quickly moves on, leaving them heart broken and unable to accept what has happened. In the opera Don José, an army corporal, has almost everything he could ever desire. He has decided to...