Chamber Music & Recitals

The famous traditional Chinese tale of La Fresque ('The Painting on the Wall') tells of two travellers who take shelter at a small temple, one of whom becomes so enraptured by the image of a beautiful girl in a fresco that he is transported into another...

Verdi's Stiffelio is a tense moral drama in which a Protestant minister learns of his wife's betrayal and is torn between a thirst for revenge and his religious duty of forgiveness. These themes of adultery and divorce were social taboos in 1850, and...

Giuseppe Saverio Mercadante was a contemporary of Donizetti and Rossini, and his prolific output of operas proved influential in founding dramatic techniques that were taken on by Verdi. Set in the ancient and besieged city of Carthage, Didone...

L'?toile did much to establish Chabrier as a major force on the Parisian stage and his contemporary Henri Duparc praised him specifically for creating a French comic genre, both funny and musical - described as something of a French Die Meistersinger...

L?onore, ou L'Amour conjugal, with a text by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly and music by Pierre Gaveaux, is one of the most famous pieces of lyric theatre that virtually no contemporary audiences have ever witnessed. This op?ra comique, which premiered at the...

Weber was at the forefront of the rise of German Romantic opera and sought to dethrone Rossini from his position as the leading operatic composer in Europe. In his breakthrough and most popular opera Der Freisch?tz ('The Marksman') composed in 1821, he...

Gioachino Rossini was summoned to Paris in 1824 to breathe new life into it's opera culture, and one of his most exciting innovations in this period was the creation of an entirely new genre of opera comedy. The risqu? tale of Le Comte Ory had it's...

Four of Sweden's most innovative choreographers travel to Ingmar Bergman's home on Faro to explore and get inspired. The result is a unique dance film, Ingmar Bergman through the Choreographer's eye. As a film director, Ingmar Bergman was also a...

Blu-ray pressing. Over a century after Madama Butterfly's premiere in 1904, Riccardo Chailly restores Puccini's original two-act version of the beloved opera to the La Scala stage. This is the first ever video release of the 1904 two-act version of...

Riccardo Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini is a four-act opera set during the Renaissance period. The plot concerns an arranged marriage between Francesca and Giovanni, also known as Gianciotto, who is impersonated by his handsome brother Paolo, and with...

These live performances from Snape Maltings Concert Hall present some of the most popular classical works for younger audiences. Their perennial appeal is a result of vivid melodies, witty instrumental characterisation, and in three works, the use of...

When lockdown was imposed in 2020 many artists began streaming performances from their own homes. In response, pianist Francesco Piemontesi and director Jan Schmidt-Garre launched a concert series to showcase artists living in Berlin, given in the...