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Left to right: Marcela Lucatelli (photo by Ana Alexandrino), Sarah Albu (photo by Martin Morisette), and Jean-François Daigneault.

Newswire | Chants Libres Launches OPER’ACTUEL

By Newswire on 17 August 2026 Classical Music, Montreal, Newswire, Opera, Vocal

Montreal, August 17, 2026 — After eight editions presented as a concert, OPER’ACTUEL is taking the next step. From September 21 to 26, Chants Libres will launch the very first edition of its biennial OPER’ACTUEL festival, a full week dedicated to contemporary opera creation. More than a change in format, this new approach reflects a renewed vision of contemporary opera. In addition to performances, the festival will feature workshops, professional showcases, conferences, discussions, public talks and auditions, making OPER’ACTUEL a space for reflection, experimentation and professional development for both artists and audiences. “The new format of OPER’ACTUEL is designed as…

Damiana Mizzi (Berenice) in Rossini Opera Festival’s L’occasione fa il ladro. Photo: Amati Bacciardi

Review | Ponnelle’s L’occasione fa il ladro Still Works Its Magic in Pesaro

By Ossama el Naggar on 17 August 2026 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

Among the many pleasures of returning to the Rossini Opera Festival is the opportunity to encounter productions that have acquired the status of living theatrical monuments. Few have proved as remarkably durable as Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s L’occasione fa il ladro, first presented in Pesaro in 1987, revived in 1996 and 2013, and now returned once again for the 2026 festival. For me, this revival possessed a particular resonance: this was the very opera I saw in 1987, on my first visit to Pesaro, at the beginning of what would become many subsequent pilgrimages to the festival. To encounter Ponnelle’s production again,…

Philippe Sly (Saint François) in Salzburg Festival’s Saint François d’Assise. Photo: SF/Monika Rittershaus

Review | Castellucci’s Transcendent Saint François d’Assise in Salzburg

By Denise Wendel-Poray on 17 August 2026 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

If not every hour I spent in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus this year felt entirely worthwhile, every minute of Olivier Messiaen’s four-and-a-half-hour Saint François d’Assise in Salzburg was profoundly affecting (seen Aug. 4). Premiered in 1983 at the Palais Garnier in Paris with José van Dam in the title role, the richness of Messiaen’s score is unequalled. Birdsong, Gregorian chant, vast blocks of orchestral colour and passages of the most delicate luminosity coexist in a musical language that seems at once ancient and startlingly new. Yet its abundance never becomes mere excess. Everything leads towards a single spiritual journey: François’s gradual…

SeokJong Baek (Calaf) & Anna Pirozzi in the title role of Arena di Verona’s Turandot. Photo: Ennevi Foto

Review | Zeffirelli’s Turandot Returns to Verona

By Ossama el Naggar on 17 August 2026 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

A century after its first performance at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, Puccini’s Turandot continues to possess the peculiar capacity to transform an opera house into an empire. Few works in the repertory combined such extravagant orchestral and choral forces with the visual language of ritual, pageantry and fairy tale quite so naturally. At the Arena di Verona, where scale itself had long been part of the theatrical vocabulary, Franco Zeffirelli’s celebrated production made a persuasive case for Turandot as grand opera in its most unabashedly monumental form. Originally created for the Arena in 2010, Zeffirelli’s staging (seen Aug. 7) remains…

Scene from Le siège de Corinthe at Rossini Opera Festival. Photo: Amati Bacciardi

Review | Rossini’s Forgotten Le siège de Corinthe Triumphs in Pesaro

By Ossama el Naggar on 12 August 2026 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

It was an excellent idea to present Le siège de Corinthe at this year’s Rossini Opera Festival, marking the bicentenary of its Parisian première. Rossini’s first French opera remained a fascinating work, not least because it represented his transformation of Maometto II, the great Neapolitan tragedy of 1820, into a monumental French grand opéra. Heard in its critical edition on Aug. 11, it offered a welcome opportunity to rediscover a score that, despite its historical importance and considerable musical riches, has remained far less familiar than its Neapolitan predecessor. The differences between the two works is significant. Paolo Erisso became…

Jennifer Holloway (Adriano) & Gabriela Scherer (Irene) in Rienzi at Bayreuth Festival. Photo: Enrico Nawrath

Review | Rienzi: Wagner’s Illegitimate Opera Premieres at Bayreuth

By Denise Wendel-Poray on 12 August 2026 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

This is a year full of questions at Bayreuth. To mark the Festival’s 150th anniversary, we were given the experiment—apparently a one-off—of an AI-generated Ring. As I wrote in an earlier article, it was a spectacular failure: a virtual ghost ship coasting on the open seas with remnants on board of every Ring production that has occurred at Bayreuth since 1876. The result was as tasteless as winter tomatoes, a kind of Ersatz Wagner: it looked like opera and—thanks to the masterful direction of Christian Thielemann—sounded like opera, but we could never really sink our teeth into it. The question…

Scene from Götterdämmerung at Bayreuth Festival. Photo: Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath

Review | The Death of the Director: Bayreuth’s 150th Festival AI Ring

By Denise Wendel-Poray on 4 August 2026 Concert Reviews, Multimedia, Opera, Vocal

At the end of Bayreuth’s new Ring, one question remains more urgent than any discussion of how to rate the production: who, exactly, is the director? Musically, there can be little disagreement. Christian Thielemann conducted one of the finest Ring performances Bayreuth has heard in decades. The Festival Orchestra played with astonishing refinement, the chorus sang magnificently, and among the 24 principal singers the level was generally high, if inevitably uneven. Klaus Florian Vogt’s astonishing assumption of three roles produced mixed results: his Loge was superb, his Siegmund disappointing, while his Siegfried was convincing in Siegfried before faltering in Götterdämmerung.…

Benjamin Bruns (Erik) & Elisabeth Teige (Senta) in Der fliegende Holländer at Bayreuth Festival. Photo: Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath

Review | Not a Ghost Ship: Tcherniakov’s Der fliegende Holländer at Bayreuth

By Denise Wendel-Poray on 31 July 2026 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

After two evenings of Bayreuth’s much-discussed new Ring—a production conceived around artificial intelligence and credited to a curator or “technical conceptor” rather than a theatre director—the Festival itself had begun to resemble the ghost ship of Wagner’s opera: drifting, its captain nowhere to be seen. It came as an immense relief, then, to encounter Der fliegende Holländer with someone unmistakably at the helm (seen July 29). Whatever one thinks of Dmitri Tcherniakov’s conclusions, there is never any doubt that he knows exactly where he is taking the drama. Tcherniakov belongs to that increasingly rare breed of opera directors who begins…

Scene from Carmen at Salzburg Festival. Photo: Virginia Rota

Review | Markus Hinterhäuser’s Carmen in Salzburg

By Denise Wendel-Poray on 31 July 2026 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

There are few opening nights in the cultural calendar that rival Salzburg’s. Long before the orchestra tunes, the Grosses Festspielhaus becomes the stage for another performance: politicians, captains of industry, opera royalty, film stars, matinée idols, and television personalities stroll down the red carpet while cameras flash and crowds gather behind the barriers. The festival’s first spectacle is one of arrival, status, and ritual. This year, however, the spectacle on July 26 was missing a key player. It was the first Salzburg Festival to open without Markus Hinterhäuser since he assumed artistic leadership in 2017, although every aspect of the…

Dmytro Voronov (Marquis de Boiscivry) & Juliette Amirault (Alice) in Le mariage en poste at Rossini in Wildbad. Photo: Patrick Pfeiffer

Review | Bel canto Rarities at Rossini in Wildbad

By Ossama el Naggar on 28 July 2026 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

Among Europe’s summer opera festivals, Rossini in Wildbad occupies a position unlike any other. It neither sought the glamour of Salzburg nor the international celebrity culture of Pesaro. Instead, over nearly four decades, it quietly established itself as one of the most intellectually stimulating and artistically rewarding destinations for lovers of 19th-century Italian opera. Founded in 1989 by its artistic director Jochen Schönleber, the festival took as its point of departure Gioachino Rossini’s visit to the Black Forest spa in 1856. What might have remained little more than a historical curiosity instead became the foundation of an enterprise that has…

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