Stéphanie d'Oustrac

This epic opera follows Virgil, beginning as the Greeks appear to have ceded the field after ten years of the Trojan War. Cassandra tries to warn of the terrible fate to come, but fate is set and Troy falls. The first two acts cover this tragic end, then the flight of survivors to Carthage and events at Carthage continue in acts 3 - 5, culminating in the further voyage for Italy and Rome. This is Virgil's classic epic, in operatic form, in about a three and a half hour performance from French Opera.

Inspired by a fable by La Fontaine, [composer Jean-Philippe] Rameau produced perhaps his most brilliant music for his penultimate great work, blending reality and the surreal on several levels.

This is a joy from beginning to end. Although there are many tricks and ideas from Laurent Pelly, as always he seems to still retain the Offenbach magic. La Lott and Monsieur Beuron are a joy, but so is everyone else. The Patriotic Trio by the sea is both a hoot and wonderfully sung, the score seems truly complete yet never flags and the finale sequences for especially acts 1 & 2 are a joy of movement and sound fused as one glorious Offenbachian moment.

When a free-spirited woman is arrested, an impressionable soldier is charmed into letting her go. But having risked everything to be with her and lost, his hopes of happiness soon turn into a jealous rage. With equal parts danger and desire, Carmen is an intoxicating cocktail that never fails to excite the senses. French mezzo-soprano Stéphanie d'Oustrac plays the seductive heroine with a rock ‘n’ roll attitude who bears more than a passing resemblance to Amy Winehouse. Spanish director Àlex Ollé’s production is conducted by Kazushi Ono at the New National Theatre Tokyo.

In the sumptuous Art Deco setting of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Orchestre national de France performs one of the masterpieces of French Romanticism with a stellar vocal cast: Stéphanie d'Oustrac, John Irvin, Paul Gay, and Frédéric Caton.

Meet Mignon , a shy and ingenuous young girl ignorant of her past, who will see her quest for identity upset by a terrible love triangle.

Berlioz’s whimsical and nostalgic take on Shakespeare’s great comedy Much Ado About Nothing graces the stage of Glyndebourne in Laurent Pelly’s astute 2016 production. Italian maestro Antonello Manacorda leads the London Philharmonic in Berlioz’s brilliant score.

Micaela Villegas was Lima's leading theatrical lady in the 1770's when Peru was a Spanish colony. Her life was fictionalized in a one-act play by Prosper Merimee and a libretto was fashioned on which Offenbach created his opera bouffe La Perichole, reflecting the creative mania in Paris at the time for Spanish life and art. La Perichole and Piquillo, her lover and companion in misfortune, are impoverished street singers. Meanwhile the Viceroy Don Andres de Ribeira wishes to make her his lover. In music of vivacious rhythms including boleros, seguidillas and rich arias, Offenbach plays out their love against a broader social canvas.

The oratorio concerns the Christian martyr Theodora and her Christian-converted Roman lover, Didymus.

A return to its roots for Castor et Pollux, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s lyric tragedy first performed in 1737 at the Académie royale and inspired by the mythological episode of the Gemini. Rarely performed in its original version – the score was reworked by Rameau himself in 1754 –, this daring work plays on contrasts and expressiveness, as in the famous “Tristes apprêts”. The aria is sung by Télaïre mourning the death of her fiancé Castor, killed in battle, before his twin brother Pollux descends into the Underworld to ask his father, Jupiter, to bring him back to life. While this opera celebrates brotherly love, its prologue poses an essential question for director Peter Sellars: how do you stop a war and its attendant hatred and resentment?

Boldly rewriting the opera’s dialogue to accommodate his concept, Mr. Tcherniakov presents “Carmen” as a large-scale role-play, a novel bit of psychotherapy for a numb modern man.