La Vie parisienne

Renee Fleming stars in Dvorak's three-act opera based on two fairy-tales which tells the story of a water-nymph called Rusalka (Fleming), who wishes she was human, after falling in love with a mortal.

Francesco Cavalli, a natural successor to Monteverdi, was the most famous and influential Italian opera composer during the mid-17th century. Cardinal Mazarin, chief minister to the king, commissioned Cavalli to create a Parisian spectacle to celebrate the wedding of the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV and the Infanta of Spain. Ercole amante (‘Hercules in Love’) was the flattering subject chosen for this regal extravaganza combining larger-than-life characters with mythology, and genuine human emotions with natural and cosmic phenomena. The result is a sumptuous Baroque spectacle, conceived on a vast scale in this lavish production by directors Valerie Lesort and Christian Hecq.

No one better described the half-starved, struggling artists than Murger in his Scènes de la Vie de Bohème: artists ready to burn a manuscript to try to keep warm yet,in an era of triumphant bourgeois materialism, dreaming of another existence. Taking up these scenes of Bohemian life, Puccini offers us a heart-breaking love story and some of the most beautiful music in the history of opera in the story of the poet Rodolfo and fragile Mimi. The staging of this new production has been entrusted to Claus Guth who sets the drama in a future devoid of hope in which love and art become the sole means of transcendence.

A production of Lully's 1686 tragédie lyrique masterpiece directed by William Christie at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées from 2008.

The love story of young Countess Natasha Rostova and Count Pierre Bezukhov is interwoven with the Great Patriotic War of 1812 against Napoleon's invading army.

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.

Robert Carsen's production of Benjamin Britten's opera for Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona.

In the 18th century, in the palace of Pasha Selim, in a purely imaginary Turkey. Belmonte, a young Spanish nobleman, is searching for his fiancée, Constance, who has been captured by pirates and sold to Pasha Selim. Blonde, Constance’s English maid, and her lover Pedrillo, Belmonte’s servant, have suffered the same fate and are at the mercy of the cruel Osmin, the seraglio’s guardian. Belmonte and Pedrillo devise a plan to rescue Constance, who is determined to die rather than succumb to the advances of Pasha Selim, who is eager to win the heart of his beautiful captive. ‘The Abduction from the Seraglio’ (‘Die Entführung aus dem Serail’ K.384) is a three-act singspiel by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with a German libretto by Gottlieb Stephanie, based on the play by Christoph Friedrich Bretzner. It premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 16 July 1782, conducted by the composer. Recorded live at Glyndebourne Festival, July 19, 2015.

Praised by critics as “magnificent”, “breathtakingly theatrical” and full of “zestful imagination”, Melly Still’s “spine-tingling” Rusalka is a Glyndebourne classic – a magical contemporary reimagining of a much-loved fairy tale. Light and darkness, beauty and danger come together in this passionate tale of love against the odds. At once evocative and unsettling, this production collides two contrasting worlds in Rae Smith’s elegant designs made of “brilliant stage-pictures”. Rusalka’s forest home is a dappled space of sunshine and shadows, full of strange woodland creatures, while the Prince’s court is a world of sleek modernity and sophistication – a world of man.

In the 18th century, in the palace of Pasha Selim, in a purely imaginary Turkey. Belmonte, a young Spanish nobleman, is searching for his fiancée, Constance, who has been captured by pirates and sold to Pasha Selim. Blonde, Constance’s English maid, and her lover Pedrillo, Belmonte’s servant, have suffered the same fate and are at the mercy of the cruel Osmin, the seraglio’s guardian. Belmonte and Pedrillo devise a plan to rescue Constance, who is determined to die rather than succumb to the advances of Pasha Selim, who is eager to win the heart of his beautiful captive. ‘The Abduction from the Seraglio’ (‘Die Entführung aus dem Serail’ K.384) is a three-act singspiel by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with a German libretto by Gottlieb Stephanie, based on the play by Christoph Friedrich Bretzner. It premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 16 July 1782, conducted by the composer. Recorded live at Glyndebourne Festival, July 19, 2015.

Louis Langrée, Guillaume Gallienne and Clairemarie Osta combine performing arts to honour these two masterpieces, inspired by the gallant XVIIIth century, in a show that celebrates comic spirit’s fruitfulness and freedom in genre.

Pushkin folk tale as comedic opera whose sultry elements expand an Oriental influence. Korsakov portrays the story of Tsar Nicholas II, punished for his cowardice and despotism, using satire to condemn Russia's autocratic ruler.

The devil is hard at work in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress! The three-act opera was premiered at Venice’s La Fenice in 1951 and is whimsically staged and performed in this production from the 2010 Glyndebourne opera festival.

Glyndebourne's Saul stole the summer and had critics raving. The Guardian (****) applauded virtuoso stagecraft from director Barrie Kosky in his debut production there, calling the show a theatrical and musical feast of energetic choruses, surreal choreography and gorgeous singing. For The Independent, which ranked it amongst five top classical and opera performances of 2015, there was no praise too high for the cast. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Ivor Bolton sparkles from the pit with period panache, and designer Katrin Lea Tag's exuberant costumes (The Times ****) set the Old Testament story in Handel's time, with a witty twinge of the contemporary.