A judge is called upon to judge a crime of which he is the guilty party. This case of conscience, whether or not to confess his crime, is the pretext for many improbable acts of boorishness, a ferocious spectacle of human relations, unbearable to watch... if laughter were not there to detach us...
“Everyone steals according to one’s position in society.” A social critique, a credo to live by, and a recipe for the hilarious satire of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Brigands! The Opéra Comique’s rollicking 2011 production took full advantage of the talents of stage directors Macha Makeïeff...
Performed at Madrid's historic Teatro Real in 2018, Ivor Bolton conducts Benjamin Britten's opera based on Lytton Strachey's 1928 Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History. In her repeated clashes with the Earl of Essex-a longtime favorite of the queen who was ultimately put to death for...
Like Handel’s Orlando (1732) and Ariodante (1734), Alcina derives from the narrative material in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. The story of the sorceress Alcina, an initially hedonistic, manipulative woman who later finds herself a victim of love, fits into the genre of the ‘magical opera’...
In the 60s, in the heart of a village, Robert lives with his mother Odette. About fifty, balding, paunchy, Robert spends most of his time locked in the garage where he tries to develop a teleport machine. Robert will try to teleport himself, but a fly is stuck in the machine, and the scientific...
In Tamerlano, Handel defied rules both written and tacit—offering a main role to a mature tenor at a time when the castrato voice dominated; and not shying away from shocking scenes that other composers approached hesitantly, like suicide. Pierre Audi’s elegant, minimalist staging allows an...
