A passionate count enlists a local barber and jack-of-all-trades to help him woo and wed a quick-witted woman. But it will take all their cunning - as well as some disguises and bribes - to ensure love wins the day. This production of Rossini’s comic masterpiece revives and stylises a historic...
Sergei S. Prokofiev's monumental setting of Leo N. Tolstoy's epic novel, War and Peace. The composer and his wife Mira compressed the plot, set during Napoleon's Russian campaign, into a powerful sequence of scenes in which the love story between Natasha Rostova and Andrei Bolkonsky and the...
Lying in bed, Tsar Dodon dreams of retirement. The problem is, people keep invading his country. His astrologer offers him a golden cockerel with magical powers, a weather vane which indicates from which direction danger will come. In his case, it will be from the East in the shape of a charming...
The production by Calixto Bieito extracts all the potential from this work in a most convincing and spine-chilling way. The action takes place in a closed society of the 1950s, taking this story of witchcraft, sex and religion to the realism of imitation leather sofas, crochet cardigans, medical...
When a power vacuum opens up in Tsarist Russia, a ruthlessly ambitious prince conspires with the Streltsy militia and the schismatic Old Believers to usurp the throne. Based on real life events surrounding the Moscow Uprising of 1682, Mussorgsky’s political thriller is a powerful portrayal of a...
Rimsky-Korsakov lavished a gorgeous score on this rustic tale of love and the supernatural. This acclaimed 2008 production by the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre marks the opera’s first appearance on DVD. The company’s brilliant staging is modern in its...
