‘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.

The first-ever audio-visual recording of this opera – directed by Christof Loy, conducted by Marc Al...

Starring Jonas Kaufmann as Bacchus and featuring Emily Magee with Daniel Harding conducting the Vien...

A romantic opera in three acts with music and libretto by Richard Wagner, performed by the Orchestra...

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

Live performance from the Schwetzinger Festspiele, 1987. At the age of 21, Italian composer Giacchin...

Filmed at the Vienna State Opera in 2005, Andrei Serban's production of Massenet's opera with a late...

The Lyric Opera of Chicago's 1985 production of Puccini's opera, set in the late nineteenth century ...

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

Woody Allen's production of the Puccini comic opera at LA Opera in 2015

This May 2010 production of Massenet's 1910 opera "Don Quichotte" marked the opera's centenary and a...

This set has Edita Gruberova singing in top form, all her scooping cast aside, which one finds in ab...

Handel's 1724 opera Tamerlano followed the success of his previous year's Giulio Cesare with another...

2014 marks a year of celebration recognizing the 150th birthday year of the German late-Romantic orc...

Rarely has a production of Verdi’s Otello been staged in such a prestigious location: the courtyard ...

The tale of a quick-witted fox and her escape from confinement for a life in the forest.

At first glance, the title of Shostakovich’s opera seems to speak for itself: Katherina, neglected a...

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

The young soldier Don José intends to marry Micaëla, a girl from his home village. But when he meets...

Lucia’s brother Enrico is horrified to learn she has fallen in love with his sworn enemy Edgardo. He...