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Olga Busuioc's 'performance of sustained dramatic intensity and vocal brilliance, brings direction and shape to the Miskimmon 'concept,' in a Festival-premiere revived from the 2016 tour. The Guardian lauds her reading's 'perception of clarity, dispassionate, yet full of heart, sensuously and expertly played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the eagerly responsive baton of Omer Meir Wellber.'

During his years in Italy. Handel absorbed the music of his contemporaries and mastered new stylistic trends. Though the staging of to resurrezione was a memorable event in the Roman musical world, it was the production of Agrippina that marked Handel₂s definitive investiture as an operatic composer. It met with enormous success and an unprecedented number of performances followed. Its melodic power is overwhelming and in his creation of credible and vivid characters.

It tells the story of Orphée's descent into the Underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice. His singing has the power to overcome the guardian Furies, but the path of true love is shadowed by sorrow and tragedy. As a true 'drama of the soul' with intense psychological and emotive power, the show shook enlightenment Europe to its core.

Charts the twists and turns of Arabella and her sister, Zdenka, in finding true love. Arabella longs for the 'right' man to marry, but her father needs her to marry a rich husband to rescue the family fortunes he has gambled away. Zdenka has already fallen in love with one of Arabella's suitors, Matteo, yet as the family cannot afford to launch two girls into Viennese society she has been brought up as a boy called Zdenko and cannot reveal her love.

Based on real events and drawing on Georg Büchner's revolutionary play, Alban Berg's Wozzeck turns a grimly tragic narrative of violence and murder into one of the most powerful and original operas of the 20th century. Berg's uncompromising portrayal of brutality and madness generated much controversy, but the significance of Wozzeck was soon recognised; its compelling lyrical expansiveness, large-scale dramatic gestures and remarkable musical structures producing music of overwhelming emotional intensity.

The opera is centered around the love Roman dictator Lucio Silla bears for his enemy's daughter Giunia, who favors the exiled senator Cecilio as the object of her affection. After many twists and turns, the lovers are united in marriage and Silla renounces his crown.

This new release from Opus Arte is a live recording from the Glyndebourne Opera House, Lewes, taken in July of 2015, of the first ever professional UK staging of Donizetti's Poliuto. This masterpiece is rarely performed, but is nevertheless a masterwork that shows the magnanimous genius of this bel canto opera composer. The exhilarating American tenor Michael Fabiano sings the role of Poliuto, and fellow world-class singers Ana Maria Martínez and Igor Golovatenko round out a spectacular cast.

The collaboration of the poet John Dryden and Henry Purcell marked a conspicuous leap forward for English opera. Their greatest project, King Arthur, is a five-act dramatick opera, the text of which had its origins in a patriotic musical play Dryden had written in 1684 but which he radically overhauled. The result was a work that appealed to the audiences enthusiasm for fine costumes, lavish sets, ingenious stage machinery and a cast of singers, dancers and instrumentalists, containing vocal show-stoppers such as the imperishable Frost Scene and Fairest isle. This critically acclaimed staging uses a new performing edition by René Jacobs, and is sung in English with German dialogue.

The plot of Gounod's opera is drawn from Matthew Lewis's once famous 1796 novel The Monk. The subject is a Gothic melodrama featuring warring families, two lovers, and the vengeful specter of the Nun, to which Gounod responds with music that fuses Romanticism with the supernatural on the grandest scale. This ground-breaking production features memorable set pieces enhanced by the stark drama of the stage setting and brilliant cinematic lighting effects.

Despite their differences, brothers Moses and Aron must convince the Jewish slaves escaping from Egypt that there is only one true God.

George Benjamin and Martin Crimp's second full-length opera draws on the real-life relationship between King Edward II and Piers Gaveston. An exploration of how personal relationships can have fatal political consequences.

Weber was at the forefront of the rise of German Romantic opera and sought to dethrone Rossini from his position as the leading operatic composer in Europe. In his breakthrough and most popular opera composed in 1821, he succeeded in his aim of establishing a truly German form. Turning to the folklore and folk songs of his native land, he took a story of a marksman who makes a pact with the Devil, vesting it with powerful intensity and an astonishing control of orchestral color and atmosphere.