

Pious restraint comes face to face with sensuous hedonism in Camille Saint-Saëns’s grand-opera retelling of the Bible story of Samson and Delilah. Multi-Olivier Award winning director Richard Jones returns to The Royal Opera to stage this spectacular fin-de-siècle masterpiece, not performed at Covent Garden since 2004. Elina Garanca stars as the Philistine Dalila, SeokJong Baek as the inspiring Jewish hero Samson and Antonio Pappano conducts the full forces of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. With superb singing in solos and duets of great intimacy and fervour, gorgeous music with thrilling orchestral interludes, and splendid choral numbers for the Royal Opera Chorus – this is a performance to remember.
High Priest
First Philistine
Second Philistine
Messenger
Abimélech
Samson’s Rabbi

Pious restraint comes face to face with sensuous hedonism in Camille Saint-Saëns’s grand-opera retelling of the Bible story of Samson and Delilah. Multi-Olivier Award winning director Richard Jones returns to The Royal Opera to stage this spectacular fin-de-siècle masterpiece, not performed at Covent Garden since 2004. Elina Garanca stars as the Philistine Dalila, SeokJong Baek as the inspiring Jewish hero Samson and Antonio Pappano conducts the full forces of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. With superb singing in solos and duets of great intimacy and fervour, gorgeous music with thrilling orchestral interludes, and splendid choral numbers for the Royal Opera Chorus – this is a performance to remember.
2024-01-01
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0.0The director, Roland Schwab, has created his version of Hell. The set is like a high iron walled hanger and the stage is continually occupied with people who look like fugitives from Mad Max and who interact with Mefistofele. The orchestra and choir are wonderful. Rene Pape gives a nuanced interpretation with a certain amount of sardonic humour under the evil. His singing and acting are first rate, as is that of Kristine Opolais and Joseph Calleja.
0.0Inspired by Beaumarchais' comedy, Rossini retains all the passion to create this bubbling opera buffa. A native of Venice, the cradle of the commedia dell’arte, Damiano Michieletto is sensitive to the burlesque vein of Rossinian music. He transposes the action of this "unnecessary precaution" into a contemporary Seville inspired by the cinema of Almodóvar. Bartolo’s monumental building, in which Figaro swirls in free electron, allows the director to give free rein to his crazy imagination.
0.0Isabella is a strong, independent woman who has no intention of giving in to the clumsy advances of the powerful Mustafà. In the production by BAFTA winners Mosh Leiser and Patrice Caurier, which plays with prejudices about clashing cultures, Mustafà is no longer an Ottoman bey, but a shady gangster who traffics electronic goods in the port of Algiers.
0.0André Heller is staging "Der Rosenkavalier" (his first opera production) at the Berlin State Opera. The story of a young nobleman caught between two women in Maria Theresa's Vienna is full of bold twists and fantastic entanglements. And as if made for an imaginative realization with all the means of modern theater. André Heller can rely on a first-class ensemble... André Heller is a chansonnier, actor, circus founder, vaudeville maker and stager of spectacles in which a variety of genres are combined with exuberant fantasy. In Berlin, Heller follows in the footsteps of Max Reinhardt, who ruled the Berlin stages at the beginning of the 20th century and revolutionized the theater with a multitude of innovations. Reinhardt also staged the world premiere of "Der Rosenkavalier" in 1911. It will be interesting to see how today's multimedia genius deals with the legacy of the great theater genius of yesteryear.
0.0A devil is at work in the Ukrainian village of Sorochintsy, terrifying residents and travellers alike. Among them a farmer whose daughter is not allowed to marry her lover because her quarrelsome stepmother is against it.
0.0Tim Albery's Olivier-nominated production for The Royal Opera delves deep into the psychology of Wagner's cursed wanderer and his beloved Senta, detailing the monomania and uncompromising idealism that finally drives them apart. Michael Levine's elemental single set is dominated by a rolling metal hull that represents the Dutchman's phantom ship, the poverty of Senta's home and the treacherous sea.
8.8This seminal work of avant-garde opera from composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson arrives full-circle, coming to France, the site of its 1976 Avignon Festival world premiere, at the tail end of this 2014 revival tour for a landmark Theâtre du Châtelet production and a first ever filming by award-winning arts filmmaker Don Kent. Eschewing conventional narrative, the opera revolves loosely around pacifist Einstein’s relationship to the creation of the atomic bomb.
0.0Lovers Edgar and Lucia dream of happiness, but Lucia's brother Henry is preparing her marriage to another man. He forces his sister to sign a marriage contract and enter into an open fight with Edgar.
8.0The show is a dramatization of the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart beginning from the age of 17 and culminating with his death in 1791 at the age of 35.
0.0Stefan Zucker, the world's highest tenor, visits the opera divas of his childhood. The journey from apartment to apartment, from diva to diva, from Rome to Milan, turns into an opera road movie.
0.0After a celebrated career as a composer of lighthearted operetta, Jacques Offenbach turned his hand to more serious fare—only to die before his one true opera was completed. That work, Les Contes d’Hoffmann, was based on a play that strung together a collection of stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann and cast the famed poet as the protagonist of his own tales. In this performance from the 2024–25 Live in HD season, French tenor Benjamin Bernheim stars as Hoffmann, four times unlucky in love. Alongside him as the objects of his affections, soprano Erin Morley is the high-flying automaton Olympia, mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine is the Venetian courtesan Giulietta, and soprano Pretty Yende is both the diva Stella and the ill-fated songstress Antonia. Bass-baritone Christian Van Horn portrays the four nefarious Villains who outwit Hoffmann at every turn, and mezzo-soprano Vasilisa Berzhanskaya is Hoffmann’s Muse and his companion Nicklausse, conducted by Marco Armiliato.
7.0Extraordinary soprano Lise Davidsen stars as the volatile diva Floria Tosca for the first time at the Met. David McVicar’s thrilling production also features tenor Freddie De Tommaso in his eagerly anticipated company debut as Tosca’s revolutionary lover, Cavaradossi, and powerhouse baritone Quinn Kelsey as the sadistic chief of police Scarpia. Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the electrifying score, which features some of Puccini’s most memorable melodies. This live cinema transmission is part of the Met’s award-winning Live in HD series, bringing opera to movie theaters across the globe.
7.2Alban Berg's black, satirical opera is one of the masterpieces of the 20th Century. It charts the rise and fall of a femme fatale "created to make trouble", from life as a society hostess to prostitution and eventual bloody death at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Berg's score is intensely beautiful, and the rich characterisation brilliantly executed.
0.0At the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, the stage director Nikolaus Lehnhoff signs a remarkable production of Wagner's LOHENGRIN, the third of the German composer's main operas. This production stars an incredible cast, including Hans-Peter König, Klaus Florian Vogt, Solveig Kringelborn, Tom Fox and Waltraud Meier, accompanied by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Kent Nagano's baton.
5.4A wealthy woman discovers a vineyard worker with a beautiful operatic singing voice. She helps make him a star but then breaks his heart. He flees in misery to Mexico where he meets a sweet farm girl.
8.2A musical adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel "Notre Dame de Paris" which follows the gypsy dancer Esmeralda and the three men who vie for her love: the kind hunchback Quadimodo, the twisted priest Frollo, and the unfaithful soldier Phoebus.
0.0‘A beautiful song – a shame that it shows such disrespect to the Mayor!’ This remark from the score of The Golden Cockerel highlights the delicious ambiguity of this work. Principally inspired by Washington Irving and Pushkin, Rimsky-Korsakov called on the talents of Vladimir Belsky, an author of other libretti of a fairy-tale, legendary nature and an expert on Russian folk literature. The composer, a genius at orchestration, has given us sparkling music, with oriental touches, that creates fully rounded characters. This is the perfect occasion for Alain Altinoglu to direct his first opera in his new role as Music Director of La Monnaie. After the success of his Don Quichotte and Cendrillon, Laurent Pelly returns to La Monnaie to stage this exuberant political satire, an adventure in unrestrained rhythm. More than a century has passed since its first performance, yet the opera has lost none of its boisterous sarcasm.
A newlywed suddenly turns into a fox. While her husband tried to keep their marriage alive, she increasingly abandons her human behavior.
7.7THIRD DAY OF THE RING CYCLE. Günter, the lord of the Rhine people, gives Siegfried a love potion that causes Siegfried to forget Brünnhilde and fall in love with Günter's sister Gutrane. Siegfried has given Brünnhilde the Ring as a token of their love, but her Valkyrie sister urges her to destroy it, because their father Wotan has lost his spear and power and is hiding out in Valhalla. Instead, Brünnhilde keeps it, and under the influence of the potion, Siegfried steals it from her. Enraged, Brünnhilde helps Alberich's son murder Siegfried, but Siegfried's memory returns, and he dies thinking of Brünnhilde. Brünnhilde repents and orders a funeral pyre to be built. She rides into the fire herself, and the Rhinemaidens get the ring back. The story closes with flames flickering about Valhalla in the background. Filmed at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in June & July 1991.