LA PIETRA DEL PARAGONE (The Touchstone) concerns the Count Asdrubale who is wealthy and therefore of great interest to many women – notably Aspasia, Fulvia, and Clarice. Only Clarice, however, loves him for something other than his riches. There are also male hangers-on: the corrupt journalist Macrobio, the poetaster Pacuvio, and Giocondo, who is Asdrubale's true friend, but who has his own eyes on Clarice. To test his friends and would-be fiancées, Asdrubale pretends that he has been bankrupted. Sure enough, only Clarice and Giocondo stand by him, and when his fortune is "miraculously" saved, the three have the last laugh on everyone else... or do they? This production is set in what looks like the early 1960s. But the real innovation is the use of blue screen technology: using tiny cameras and sets, along gigantic screens hanging over the stage, a kind of video mixing makes the singers appear to inhabit any number of fanciful settings and perform a myriad of improbable actions.

Disciplined Italian composer Antonio Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the...

Axel Köhler’s production of Der Freischütz at the Dresden State Opera was described by Die Presse as...

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A freedom fighter in Austrian-occupied Switzerland. An oppressive Habsburg governor. The most famous...

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

A dead woman wanders through the shadowy space between memory and reality, tracing the lines of her ...

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Romantic rivalries between father and son enrolled at the same college.
A look at the entire process of creating and developing Patrice Chéreau’s third staging of "In the S...

Teatro Alla Scala 1983 production of three one-act operas from Puccini.

Josie Geller, a baby-faced junior copywriter at the Chicago Sun-Times, must pose as a student at her...

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Simon Rattle conducts the Berliner Philharmoniker in Stepháne Braunschweig's production of Richard W...

Premiered in 1787, “Don Giovanni” exposes the timeless theme of a man hovering between vitality and ...

John Adams’s groundbreaking work vividly brings to life US President Nixon’s 1972 visit to the Peopl...