Chamber Music & Recitals

In 1834 Bellini stated that choosing a good subject for an opera was "more difficult than creating the music itself." The success of Il Prata, with a plot containing all the ingredients of Romantic popular literature, convinced Bellini and Romani to...

This work is captivating in it's intensity and focuses on aspects of and moments in Tasso's rich, eventful life. Indeed, Donizetti seems to have been so actively involved in drafting his subject that he may well have seen in Tasso not a little of himself...

Michael Praetorius was the most prolific German composer of his generation, making use of a beauty of sound and an abundance of instruments worthy of his contemporary Monteverdi. Here we have a festive Christmas Mass as might have been heard in a great...

Known as a creator of astonishing images, stage director and visual artist Robert Wilson delivers a magnificent production of Mozart's adaption of Handel's Messias. Mozart was commissioned by Gottfried van Swieten to modernize the score fifty years after...

The first masterpiece of sacred music is undoubtedly the mythical Vespers of Monteverdi, first published in Venice in 1610. Quintessential of the great Italian polychoral style of writing, with it's choirs, initially distributed throughout the entire...

We all remember the "Austrian woman" by her nickname "Madam deficit," but on the other hand, if you put aside the parties, the balls, and the extravagant garments, Marie-Antoinette's pronounced fondness for the arts, the theater, music, and dance is less...

Operetta enthusiast Barrie Kosky has landed a gigantic success with Offenbach's subversive and hilarious reversion of the Orpheus myth at the Salzburg Festival. Kosky created a magically precise and witty staging with numerous extravagant costumes in a...

Louis Dieudonn? de Bourbon was crowned Louis XIV King of France on the 7th of June 1654 in Reims Cathedral. For this most important moment in the life of the Monarch, the ceremonial was as impressive as a sacred opera. Reims Cathedral, dressed in the...

John Cranko's mastery of the art of the pas de deux finds it's climax in Onegin, one of the most successful full length ballets of the 20th century. Set to sweeping music by Tchaikovsky, it tells Alexander Pushkin's tragic love story of the world-weary...

Cross Currents DVD

The Niquet, Shirley & Dino trio was formed on the occasion of Purcell's King Arthur, a show that marked the lyric stage and the world of the DVD. Five years later, their complicity has been further reinforced, and they present a work close to Herv?...

55 years after it's premiere, the Stuttgart Ballet revisits John Cranko's legendary "Romeo and Juliet" - the very choreography which laid the foundations for the "Stuttgart Ballet Miracle", the company's meteoric rise to fame. Vividly etched characters,...