Buratto/De Tommaso/Orchestra I Pomeriggi Musicali/Milletarì
(Decca)
The long-lost score, finally premiered 138 years after it was written, brims with melodic promise despite its dramatic shortcomings

It was a bold move by the 21-year-old Umberto Giordano to enter the 1888 one-act opera competition won by Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Marina, set in Montenegro during an unspecified conflict with Serbia, came sixth, the score languishing until 2026, when it received its belated premiere at Milan’s Teatro dal Verme. This recording reveals a composer with a keen ear for musical colour even if the opera is no masterpiece.

When Marina, a Montenegrin, takes in Giorgio, a wounded Serb, the inevitable conflict with her brother and her bullish suitor precipitates a typical verismo catastrophe. After a militaristic opening, Marina takes centre stage with an aching ballad of lost opportunity. Her scene with the injured Giorgio follows abruptly, redeemed by Giordano’s knack for trotting out appealing melodies. It’s not the most sophisticated writing but it comes straight from the heart.

Composers from Purcell to Birtwistle have created passionate dramas inspired by ancient Greek stories – and none of them require you to sit through three hours of solemn spectacle without an interval

For me, the most astonishing thing about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is its barnstorming popularity. I found this cinematic epic for the ages visually bloodless, expressively monotonous and very, very long. Mind you, it is good to know that Nolan thinks that war is, on balance, you know, once you really think about it, probably a bad idea.

The music, too, was disappointing. If I were Nolan, I’d have asked Mica Levi to score The Odyssey. Ludwig Göransson could have surely done more to make a soundworld of genuine strangeness, but all he could manage is a falling tritone and then a descending fifth on the two reeds and pipes of a recreated aulos, which he uses as a melancholy leitmotif in all-too-conventional Hollywood fashion. (The aulos is beautifully played by Callum Armstrong on the soundtrack, at least.) The best sounds in the film come in the scene with Samantha Morton’s Circe, in which the crew’s gluttony is horrorshow ASMR: surround-sound mastication that threatens to devour the audience.

Bayreuth festival theatre, Bayreuth
Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka’s production swaps 14th-century Rome for an abstract near future in an over-busy staging . Jennifer Holloway’s Adriano is a standout in a strong cast

It was Adolf Hitler’s favourite opera – and thus vital to a historical chapter that Germany’s Bayreuth festival long preferred to avoid. But Rienzi has finally arrived at Wagner’s symbolic HQ, opening the 150th anniversary season as an exception to the festival’s rigid canon of his 10 “mature” works.

Rienzi’s problems are unavoidable. Since the complete handwritten score was given to Hitler and subsequently disappeared, no authentic version of Wagner’s longest opera exists. Aesthetically, Rienzi shares the vast scale of French grand opera but sounds broadly Italian. Flashes of chromatic ambition hint at a Wagnerian language to come. Yet there are endless repetitions and the sense of an epic both overcompressed and underpowered.

Glyndebourne, East Sussex
The director hits perfectly all the comic marks of Strauss’s opera about an opera, but there’s few insights in a work that should be moving as well as frothy and fun.

Glyndebourne’s new productions this summer have followed a theme: first Tosca, about a fictional opera singer; then L’Orfeo, about the mythical musician. Now comes Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos – an opera about an opera. It starts with the shenanigans backstage as two troupes – one high art, one low – prepare after-dinner entertainment for their rich patron, then the performance that ensues when they are forced to combine their acts. The real subject is, of course, love – and that comes across only partially in Laurent Pelly’s production.

The first part finds Pelly at his witty best. We’re in the house of the richest man in Vienna, whose taste is immediately in question; Massimo Troncanetti’s set has a huge doorway of gilded, inlaid wood clashing with a very 20th-century statement chandelier. William Relton’s fearsome Major-Domo pops up everywhere, cowing even Michael Kraus’s classily sung Music Master; Ru Charlesworth’s chainsmoking Dancing Master slinks around dressed as a sequined, velvety advert for Silk Cut. Samantha Hankey, her mezzo-soprano mellow but gleaming, plays the Composer as an irascible would-be genius; Zerbinetta, the comic leading lady, teeters in stockings and suspenders. Buoyantly conducted by Robin Ticciati, the players of the London Philharmonic, reduced in number as per Strauss’s stipulations, revel in the characters’ grand hopes and small tragedies, and Pelly plays to the stereotypes brilliantly, hitting the comic marks without sending things up.

Actor who was the first Irish woman to win an Oscar for her role in the 1989 film classic My Left Foot

Brenda Fricker, who has died aged 81, was only the second Irish actor – and the first female one – to win an Oscar, for her role as Daniel Day-Lewis’s mother in the 1989 film My Left Foot, after shooting to fame in the original cast of the BBC medical drama Casualty.

As the nurse Megan Roach, she was the Mother Earth of the fictional Holby City hospital’s A&E department for the programme’s first five series (1986-90). “We knew the show had to have compassion,” said Casualty’s first producer, Geraint Morris. “We made Megan the person everyone could talk to.”

The singer on struggling with the English weather, a secret celebrity crush, and her terror of tinned spaghetti

Born in Sydney, Australia, to an Italian father and Australian mother, Natalie Imbruglia, 51, joined the cast of Neighbours at the age of 17. In 1997, she released her debut album, Left of the Middle, which gave her the global hit single Torn. She releases her seventh studio album, Algorithm, on 4 September. She lives in Oxfordshire with her son.

What is your greatest fear?
As an Italian, tinned spaghetti. As a child, I was once served it at someone’s house. It was quite frightening.

The acclaimed Irish actor started her career in Coronation Street and Casualty before a string of high-profile Hollywood roles

Brenda Fricker, who became the first female Irish Oscar winner for acting with My Left Foot, has died aged 81. Her agent Phil Belfield told the BBC in a statement: “We will never see her like again and the world is lesser for the lack of her … I was honoured to know, love and work with her and she will always have a place in my heart and in the heart of so many film and TV fans the world over.”

In My Left Foot, Fricker plays the mother of Christy Brown, whose cerebral palsy means he only has muscular control over one of his feet. The film, directed by Jim Sheridan, was released to enormous acclaim in 1989, winning the best actor Oscar for Daniel Day-Lewis as well as best supporting actress for Fricker.

Buxton festival
Francesca Caccini’s 1625 work – the earliest surviving opera by a woman – is wildly imaginative, even without the original horse ballet

There is magic in the air at this year’s Buxton festival – and it’s not just the hops from the local brewery. Wizards, sorceresses and fairies curse and charm their way through a trio of operas from three different centuries. Handel and Pauline Viardot take care of the 18th and 19th respectively, but setting the cauldron bubbling is Francesca Caccini’s 1625 La Liberazione di Ruggiero – the earliest surviving opera by a woman.

Premiered at the Medici court – then under the rule of regent Maria Maddalena of Austria – it is no coincidence that the work’s take on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso is more girl-power than most. Warrior Ruggiero has been reduced to a lovesick captive, while sorceresses Alcina (wicked) and Melissa (good) do battle over him. Add in a chorus of Alcina’s former lovers (now transformed into plants and shrubs) and you have a deliciously semi-serious, mythical romp whose premiere apparently ended with a horse ballet.

Monaco/Raftis/Colombo/Frigato/Orchestra Ghislieri/Prandi
(Arcana)
Recorded from a live performance in an 18th-century theatre in Jesi – Pergolesi’s hometown – this is a brain-addling tale of love triangles and long-lost twins set in the ancient Olympics

Pietro Metastasio’s tale of dirty doings at the ancient Olympic Games proved so popular that more than 60 composers set it to music, including Caldara (for whom it was written), Vivaldi and Cherubini. Pergolesi’s version, premiered in 1735, resurrected in 1937, is among the finest, presaging what should have been a glorious operatic career if only the composer hadn’t died at the age of 26.

The story begins as the formidable Megacle is persuaded to compete in disguise as his hot-headed and not entirely honourable friend Licida. What Megacle doesn’t know is that the prize is the hand of Aristea, the woman he has fallen in love with himself. Throw in Licida’s cast-off mistress Argene masquerading as a shepherdess and the discovery that Licida is actually Aristea’s long-lost twin and you have all the ingredients for a plot of brain-addling complexity.

Garsington Opera, Stokenchurch
Gerald Barry’s take on Wilde’s comedy is even wittier and zanier in Jack Furness’s hyperactive staging – complete with a grand piano on stilts, a herd of cows and a kangaroo that meets a grisly end

Anyone who has seen the opera before will recognise the tall rack of white dinner plates, stacked and primed for you-know-what. Anyone who knows Oscar Wilde’s play will recognise its punchlines, transposed by composer Gerald Barry into a kind of staccato mashup between speech and singing. But in Jack Furness’s new production of Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest for Garsington Opera, familiarity is otherwise avoided.

Barry has already transformed Wilde’s “trivial comedy for serious people” into what he calls “an opera of delirium”. Singing offers another layer of perversity, orchestral scoring another source of wit, and stage business a further level of zaniness. Furness’s additions include a grand piano on stilts, a kangaroo that meets a nasty end, an enormous chaise longue-cum-slide (which suffers one of the play’s mysterious explosions during the dinner interval), a dirt floor and working hose to allow the protagonists to be mud-smeared and soaked through in alternation, and a herd of miniature cows. The result is a kind of hyperactive nightmare, its pace slowed by all these efforts to shock, the comedy turned sour.

As the Bayreuth festival turns 150, we look at the composer’s huge and enduring influence, and wonder what might have happened to classical music in his absence?

One hundred and fifty years ago this summer, Richard Wagner wanted to change the world. Not only the musical world, but nationhood, political thought, even the idea of what it means to be human. The inaugural Bayreuth festival opened on 13 August 1876, with the first complete cycle of Der Ring des Nibelungen staged in Wagner’s custom-built Bayreuth Festspielhaus in Bavaria. The first audience included kings, emperors, aristocracy and politicians as well as Europe’s musical and creative elites (Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Bruckner and Liszt among them). Wagner, who had been a revolutionary on the streets of Dresden in the 1840s, intended the Ring’s four operas to usher in a new world, one redeemed and made wise by this epic story of power, love, redemption, betrayal and renewal.

The titanic impact of Wagner is almost impossible to grasp today. Stage design aside (having the orchestra entirely hidden in the pit and darkening the auditorium were two of his innovations at Bayreuth) his legacies are felt across the arts from the way Wagnerism gripped German philosophers and Paris’s painters and poets in the 19th century, to the seismic changes he wreaked in cultural politics, and the toxicity of the antisemitic bearers of the Wagnerian flame after his death in 1883.

Descendants of Julia Kerr gather for recital at Einstein’s summer house near Berlin where revived opera was set

Albert Einstein throws a party at his lakeside house at which he presents to his guests his latest invention: a time machine.

So opens the opera Chronoplan, started in the late 1920s by the composer Julia Kerr, who took the score with her when she fled Nazi Germany with her family in early 1933, its planned premiere having been halted following Hitler’s takeover.

We go behind the scenes at rehearsals for William Kentridge’s new staging of Monteverdi’s 1607 opera l’Orfeo

‘L’Orfeo is an opera about opera. It’s an opera about the power of music. It’s about the power of art to construct the world,” says director and artist William Kentridge. Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 work is, if not quite the first ever opera, the earliest opera still performed today, written when the form was in its very infancy.

Monteverdi called his work – composed for performance at the ducal court of Mantua, a “favola in musica – legend in music”. “Monteverdi was a genius,” says conductor Jonathan Cohen. “The piece is about the world’s most famous musician. He begins with a prologue where he has the allegorical character of La Musica [Music, here sung by Francesca Aspromonte, who also sings Eurydice in this production], who says ‘I am music, and I have the power to stop the birds singing, the power over nature.’ And of course Orfeo, the musician, has the power to control even the rocks, the trees, the animals and effect human emotions.”

William Kentridge (centre) during rehearsals, above, and, below, Kentridge talks with Francesca Aspromonte (La Musica/Euridice) and Roseline Wilkens (Euridice). Photograph by David Levene

The musician first visited Aldeburgh as a teenage fanboy. Now, he is at the centre of this year’s festival as its featured artist – and he’s opening with his favourite opera

Ryan Wigglesworth cuts a confident figure striding through the Royal Academy of Music in London. He’s been a professor here since 2019 – juggling his duties with his role as chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, guest conducting internationally, regular recitals as a pianist, and a busy schedule as a composer. Oh, and he’s also the father of three “boisterous” young children, whose sleepless antics have left him bleary and clutching his coffee this morning.

He sits at the head of the long table in the Academy’s oak-panelled boardroom, looking perfectly at home. Was he inevitably going to end up here?

First lady and affected families in audience for highly charged performance of excerpts of Mothers of Kherson

It was hard to imagine an opera with a subject more potentially traumatic – or cathartic – for the assembled audience. The occasion, in the grand and gilded spaces of the National Opera of Ukraine, in Kyiv, was the premiere of excerpts of Mothers of Kherson, an opera about the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russian occupiers – a continuing, raw story of real-life loss and agony.

The opera was originally intended to be about the Maidan protests of 2013-14. But the American librettist George Brant, the author of the hit play Grounded, switched course in 2023 when the stories of abducted children hit the news.

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.