Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro is in the soprano’s DNA, but she’s never thought about directing it. Creating her own production has been daunting and fascinating – and her son’s building blocks even helped

I am not one of those performers who has spent their life on a theatre stage or film set thinking, “I wish I could direct this”. However, earlier this year, I found myself with an unexpected six-week gap. A scheduled project had been delayed for technical reasons, and it was at this time that Wild Arts’ producer Max Parfitt asked how well I knew The Marriage of Figaro.

I have lived with Mozart’s opera for as long as I can remember. Susanna’s “Deh, Vieni Non Tardar” was one of the first major arias I sang, aged 12 or 13, while studying in Los Angeles. Later, I wrote my final high school paper on Figaro, the adaptation from Beaumarchais’s play to Da Ponte’s libretto. I even translated the entire score word for word, which is probably why I still know it so deeply. My Metropolitan Opera debut at 19 was in Figaro, singing Barbarina. I performed my first Susanna on the same New York stage a few years later, and I’ve since sung the role many times all over the world.

Born on a tiny, impoverished South Pacific island, Pene Pati remembers going to school without food. Now he is performing in operas at La Scala and the Met

Along roads of scarlet hibiscus and exuberant tropical foliage are the white churches of Samoa. On Sundays the choir, singing in pure harmony, rises up to the cathedral ceilings in one soaring voice of divinity.

Pene Pati, once a child in those churches, is now a commanding, magnetic presence on the world’s greatest gilded stages – a universe away from the tiny, impoverished South Pacific island of Upolu, where he was born. A tenor specialising in the lyrical repertoire and bel canto, he is booked out until 2029, from the Metropolitan Opera to La Scala to Royal Albert Hall. Last month he received the pinnacle of arts awards in France, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres – a medal, he joked in a subsequent interview, that he’d been wearing around the house, much to his wife’s disdain.

A Sydney screening of La La Land with live orchestra was rescued by a brave (and skilled) amateur pianist. What happens when classical performers, or their instruments, suddenly collapse? Plus, Tavener’s mystic pantomime finally gets to the stage

Music’s equivalent of catching a home run at a baseball game happened on Saturday in Sydney, when a 21-year-old university student jumped in to save a performance of the movie La La Land with live orchestra. The band’s keyboardist had fallen ill and couldn’t perform in the second half. Unable to find a replacement at such short notice, the conductor Justin Hurwitz (winner of two Oscars for the film’s music) asked the audience if there was a pianist in the house. Sterling Nasa answered the call, and performed in the second half, improvising a solo, and not getting a tempo change or key signature wrong.

It’s a great story – and incredible that an audience member had the requisite sight-reading and technical skills to carry it off. Could it happen in a classical concert? There have certainly been moments here too when an audience member has saved the day. The best of those stories comes from the summer of 1974, when the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus brought Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana to the Proms, conducted by André Previn, with the baritone Thomas Allen among the soloists. You can actually hear the shocking moment from the live radio broadcast when Allen collapses into the cello section in an episode of the BBC World Service’s Witness History. He had fainted and was carried off the stage. After a brief pause, Previn chose to keep going rather than stop the performance.

Opera makers have always engaged with the latest inventions while also preserving historic crafts. I believe it’s possible to look both forwards and backwards in this fast-evolving landscape

The disquiet and distrust surrounding artificial intelligence among artists and creatives remain real and consequential, and the language used by leading arts commentators is often apocalyptic: AI will decimate the arts, it is evil, it is the devil. Like many emerging technologies, AI has been driven by the corporations at the forefront of its creation. Introduced to the public at a rapid rate and continuously evolving, machine learning has become closely entwined with fear, antipathy and foreboding. At the same time, its powers and possibilities are expanding exponentially, becoming embedded in almost every aspect of human activity.

The upcoming RBO/SHIFT festival at the Royal Opera House aims to interrogate all sides of this fast-evolving landscape to enable artists, performers, creatives and audiences to think deeply and widely about where we are now, and where we may be tomorrow. Machine learning represents a seismic shift, both in society and in the arts, and we need storytellers, artists, teachers and thinkers in this space to help determine the direction of that shift and help us navigate this unfamiliar territory.

The British-born maestro will replace Gustavo Dudamel as the orchestra’s chief conductor

The Los Angeles Philharmonic has announced that Daniel Harding is to be its next music director.

The UK-born Harding, 50, will begin his tenure in the 2027/28 season, with an initial contract for six years. Gustavo Dudamel, the orchestra’s music director since 2009, leaves the role in August 2026 – the Venezuelan conductor is heading east to become music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic, but he will retain close connections with the Los Angeles orchestra as its artistic and cultural laureate.

With its screams, sex, bells and bloodshed Puccini’s opera was initially derided as a noisy disaster. Ahead of Glyndebourne’s first ever production, we look the ‘shabby little shocker’ that’s become one of opera’s most bankable masterpieces

Gustav Mahler hated it. Its publisher was convinced it would be a commercial disaster. Critics complained it was mostly just “noise” and predicted that it would quickly be forgotten. But more than 125 years since Tosca’s premiere in January 1900, Giacomo Puccini’s fifth opera remains one of the most bankable in the business.

We love a hard-won success story in classical music. Think of the tales of woe that still swirl around Beethoven’s life and works, with their implied happy ending in our own Beethoven centrism. Or there’s Wagner’s Tannhäuser being booed off the stage in 1861, before finding its way into the operatic pantheon. Or the riot supposedly provoked by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at its 1913 premiere, before everyone calmed down and the score was acclaimed a masterpiece.

Royal Opera House, London
As the central couple, SeokJong Baek and Aigul Akhmetshina are dramatically persuasive and expressive in this revival of Richard Jones’s staging that works hard to make Saint-Saëns’ often dramatically inert opera zing

“Who wants to hear Samson et Dalila?” asked George Bernard Shaw in a masterfully scathing review of Saint-Saëns’ opera in its 1893 UK premiere. “I respectfully suggest, nobody.” Samson et Dalila’s fortunes since suggest an alternative answer. But the piece remains an odd hybrid of opera and oratorio, held together by the best of its music and the talents of the two principal singers.

On the headline-act front, the Royal Opera’s first revival of Richard Jones’s 2022 production is a triumph. South Korean tenor SeokJong Baek returns as Samson, the role with which he made his acclaimed Covent Garden debut. Where dramatic chemistry with Elīna Garanča, the 2022 Dalila, was evidently in short supply, this revival boasts a role debut from the ever-astonishing young mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina. Fresh from a winning streak of Carmens, Akhmetshina exudes dramatic self-possession and physical ease, her seductive intensity the ideal foil for the tortured awkwardness of Baek’s hero.

Comedy debuts at Versailles featuring dialogue, music, costumes and scenery created with help of AI tool Le Chat

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Molière is to the French what Shakespeare is to the English: the last word in historical literature, drama, wit and satire.

Now, more than 350 years after his death, the 17th-century dramatist has been revived after scholars at the Sorbonne University in Paris used artificial intelligence to help write an experimental play in his style.

Casting director urges Keir Starmer to intervene in case of Paata Burchuladze, 71, jailed for seven years after singing at anti-regime demonstrations

The Royal Opera House in London has urged Keir Starmer to intervene in the case of Paata Burchuladze, a world-renowned bass singer who has been imprisoned in Georgia since October on a charge of leading a coup against the country’s authoritarian leader.

The 71-year-old has performed at the Royal Opera House and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and collaborated with the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras. He was arrested after joining a protest outside the presidential palace in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Last week he was given a seven-year jail sentence which Burchuladze suggested to the court was equivalent to a life sentence given his age.

After years of upheaval, English National Opera is staging its first new opera in its northern base: the Pulitzer-winning Angel’s Bone, about two angels brutally exploited by human traffickers. We talk to its creators

I’m peering into a vast hangar teeming with tech crew wearing hi-vis and hard hats. Enormous lighting rigs hang low to the ground. Somewhere out of sight is the biggest lift in Europe, allowing articulated lorries to drive straight in. This is the Warehouse in Manchester’s Aviva Studios. Since opening in 2023, this arts venue run by Factory International has presented gigs by major pop acts, the largest ever show by cult Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and a “sprawling four-hour odyssey through often naked rituals” by performance artist Marina Abramović. Now, for the first time, it’s hosting opera.

More precisely, it’s about to host English National Opera’s first production created in and for Manchester: the UK premiere of Angel’s Bone by Chinese-American composer Du Yun and Canadian librettist Royce Vavrek, staged by acclaimed Australian director Kip Williams. The opera won the 2017 Pulitzer prize, commended as a “harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world” following its 2016 world premiere in the US.

Six dancers who made bold career pivots reflect on ballet’s transferable skills, what they miss about the stage – and what they were glad to leave behind

Lana Jones, midwife, former principal dancer at the Australian Ballet

Opera needs big money: opera chiefs need big donors. New York’s Metropolitan Opera has just lost a $200m investment, but should it have accepted it in the first place?

Opera’s stories of power aren’t only played out on stage. The mechanics of producing opera involve vast amounts of people, from set builders to wig-makers to chorus and orchestra, and even vaster amounts of money. An opera company needs huge reservoirs of cash: whether from governments, companies donating for tax benefits, or private individuals whose motivations may be entirely driven by sheer love of the form, or they might not. The Royal Opera House named a hall after the American investment banker Alberto Vilar who promised the company £10m, before being convicted and imprisoned for fraud in 2010, while the Sackler family’s millions sponsored swathes of culture across the US and UK – but the source of this wealth gave the world an opioid epidemic.

So pity the poor opera house manager, trying to deal with an essentially insoluble situation: choose your donors, choose your poison. And pity especially Peter Gelb, who has been running the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the world’s biggest opera house, for the past two decades. Gelb faces in extremis the same hard economic truth that all opera houses, classical music institutions and performing groups face. Unlike so many parts of the economy, the services they provide have not become – and cannot become – more efficient. It’s what is known as Baumol’s cost disease, a term coined by the economist William J Baumol in the 1960s. One of the examples he used to illustrate the “disease” was a string quartet. It took four players in 1800 – and still, today, takes four musicians. How stupidly inefficient! It’s the same story, only exponentially less efficient and more expensive, for putting on an opera. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, one of the Met’s recent blockbuster productions, still needs an army of stage managers as well as orchestral musicians, it still requires gigantic sets and a stellar cast just as it did in 1865, all to fill the Met’s 4,000-seat auditorium.

Teatro La Fenice says Beatrice Venezi let go for making ‘repeated offensive’ statements

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Teatro La Fenice, the prestigious Venice opera house, has fired its incoming music director after she insinuated its hiring practices were nepotistic, with jobs “practically passed down from father to son”.

After months of controversy over the appointment of Beatrice Venezi, La Fenice Foundation said on Sunday it had decided to “cancel all future collaborations” with the 36-year-old conductor and pianist.

The former ballet dancer said Chalamet’s comments were ‘reckless’ in an interview with the New York Times in which she also discussed her violent childhood

Actor and former ballet dancer Charlize Theron has joined the chorus of disapproval aimed at Timothée Chalamet over his remarks that appeared to disrespect performers of ballet and opera.

In an interview with the New York Times, Theron said: “Oh, boy, I hope I run into him one day,” adding: “That was a very reckless comment on two art forms that we need to lift up constantly because, yes, they do have a hard time. But in 10 years, AI is going to be able to do Timothée’s job, but it will not be able to replace a person on a stage dancing live.”

The opera – about the hijacking of a cruise by the PLF who murder a Jewish American wheelchair user – has been subject to protests and accused of romanticising terrorism. Why was the film-maker so desperate to stage it?

In a rehearsal room perched above the labyrinthine backstage of Florence’s starkly contemporary Maggio Musicale Fiorentino theatre, Luca Guadagnino is showing the women of the chorus how to make a second-act entrance. Dressed in a slouchy cardigan and slacks, the Italian director runs forward and stops short at a line of tape indicating the rim of the stage. A little out of breath, he turns past stretching dancers to conductor Lawrence Renes and asks if he minds the sound of stamping feet. “I never mind when we hear them talk, walk, breathe,” Renes says. “It’s live theatre.”

Better known for films like After the Hunt, Challengers and Call Me By Your Name, Guadagnino still sometimes punctuates stage rehearsals with instinctive cries of “Cut!” and “Action!”. But today he is directing an opera. It’s his second ever and his first in more than 15 years – and a highly controversial one to boot. The Death of Klinghoffer, a 1991 opera with music by John Adams and libretto by Alice Goodman, has sparked accusations of antisemitism whenever and wherever it has been performed. It depicts the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by the Palestinian Liberation Front, their murder of disabled Jewish American tourist Leon Klinghoffer, and the grief and rage of his wife, Marilyn. The story is placed in a historical, even mythic, context.

Actor Timothée Chalamet was credited by RBO’s chief exec with inadvertently boosting ticket sales through his high-profile critique of the art forms

The head of the UK’s Royal Ballet and Opera has thanked Hollywood actor Timothée Chalamet for inadvertently boosting ticket sales and engagement through his high-profile critique of the art forms last month.

While promoting his Oscar-tipped film Marty Supreme in March, the star expressed his relief that he was working in cinema, rather than opera or ballet, “where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this any more.’”

Wagnerites rejoice! Parsifal and the climax of Barrie Kosky’s acclaimed Ring cycle are in the pipeline. The director of opera talks about scoring a bullseye, the storms that rocked last season – and how to avoid sending audiences to sleep

The morning I meet Oliver Mears, the director of opera at Covent Garden, I’m still walking on air. The day before I’d seen Wagner’s epic Siegfried, the third part of the Ring cycle. Nearly six hours long, it is an immersion into a world of gods and giants, heroes and warrior women – but also profound and poignant human relationships. With the remarkable Andreas Schager in the title role among a superb ensemble cast, it is the Royal Opera at its best. On the way to his office, Mears walks through the backstage labyrinth. Singers are warming up; wardrobe people are discussing a costume’s last-minute fix; and a couple of mice scurrying across the canteen lend a bohemian atmosphere. Heaven (give or take the rodents).

Mears tells me about next season: course after course of operatic banquet. There will be a new Parsifal, conducted by music director Jakub Hrůša and directed, in his house debut, by the “brilliantly charismatic and interesting” Kazakhstan-born Evgeny Titov. There’s a new Un Ballo in Maschera by Verdi, with another director fresh to the house, the “stylish and rigorous” German Philipp Stölzl. There’s a return for Richard Jones’s brilliant production of Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová with Hrůša conducting – whose interpretation of Janáček’s Jenůfa last season was one of the musical experiences of my life.

Guardian photographer David Levene was at the Royal Albert Hall to photograph the stars and the special performances at London’s biggest night of theatre

• No need for hard stares as Paddington: The Musical triumphs at Olivier awards

• Olivier awards 2026: full list of winners

• ‘I want to thank my amazing husband, who doesn’t exist!’ – Olivier awards’ best quotes

The director, who cast Chalamet in 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, spoke out in the actor’s defence ahead of the premiere of his staging of opera The Death of Klinghoffer

The director Luca Guadagnino has defended Timothée Chalamet after the actor drew criticism for suggesting that ballet and opera were art forms about which “no one cares about” any more.

Speaking to Italian newspaper La Stampa ahead of the premiere of his staging of the opera The Death of Klinghoffer in Florence, the director said reaction to Chalamet’s comments was disproportionate.

West End spectacular about beloved bear wins seven prizes, while Rachel Zegler, Rosamund Pike and Paapa Essiedu all recognised

• Olivier awards 2026: full list of winners

It was a night of sweet victory for Michael Bond’s marmalade-loving bear as Paddington: The Musical dominated the Olivier awards on Sunday. Amid the tuxes and gowns of a glittering ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the duffle coat-wearing bear got his sticky paws all over seven prizes including best new musical.

The award for best actor in a musical went to the duo who play Paddington: James Hameed provides the lovable hero’s voice and is the remote puppeteer, while Arti Shah performs in the furry costume. The show’s baddies, Tom Edden (as the busybody Mr Curry) and Victoria Hamilton-Barritt (as Millicent Clyde, who wants Paddington to literally get stuffed), won best supporting actor and best supporting actress in a musical respectively. Luke Sheppard was named best director for the production, which also picked up awards for costume design (Gabriella Slade and Tahra Zafar) and set design (Tom Pye and Ash J Woodward).