This superb 2006 production of the Los Angeles Opera's La Traviata stars Renée Fleming, who joins the ranks of the elite handful of sopranos whose vocal and acting talents make their portrayals memorable. Her Violetta Valéry is a vulnerable figure torn between self-indulgence and love, sacrificing personal happiness to become a victim of the social mores of mid-19th-century bourgeois France. Fleming's acting captures the complexity of the character and her vocalism is flawless. She negotiates the wild coloratura of Act One with aplomb, and is stunning in the lyric passages that pervade the opera, and touching in her scenes with her lover, Alfredo, and his father. Her singing is free of the mannerisms that have sometimes crept into her work and at the same time she brings countless personal touches to the role, phrasing and verbal emphases that shed fresh light on the character.

Starring the exquisite coloratura soprano Emma Matthews as the innocent girl priestess Lakmé, and su...

Berlioz’s colossal masterpiece requires stupendous forces—dozens of soloists, enormous chorus, orche...

A Victor Hugo play, haunting and scandalous, provided the inspiration for Verdi’s mid-career masterp...
Politics and love leads to a love triangle between father, son and stepmother.

In the 50's, in Paris, the neighbors Rodolfo and Mimi meet each other when Mimi's candle blows out i...

Nabucco - live from Metropolitan Opera, June 2002. On its surface, Nabucco is about the epic strugg...

A new generation of rising stars shines in Franco Zeffirelli’s classic production of Puccini’s most ...

The Royal Ballet performs Tchaikovsky's classic ballet, choreographed by Liam Scarlett and starring ...

Shortly after WWII, the DEFA Studios produced a series of operas and operettas which belonged to the...

A musical drama based on Giuseppe Verdi's opera Rigoletto.

Götterdämmerung, the final instalment of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, is a story of human passions...

Take a perfect cast, a great conductor and a groundbreaking staging in-out makes a 'Tristan' for ete...

The painter Lili Elbe was the first person to have gender confirmation surgery in the 1930s. The hom...

Francesco Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur was inspired by the real-life story of a celebrated actress at ...

Recorded at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1995, this acclaimed presentation of composer Gioachi...

The life and career of Italian opera singer Farinelli, considered one of the greatest castrato singe...

It took Anna 10 years to recover from the death of her husband, Sean, but now she's on the verge of ...

An operatic film adaptation of the poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar of the same name.