Performer: Tae-Joong Yang

Within Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the darkest corners of the soul are exposed by music, stirred up by the lying, lecherous exploits of the aristocratic scoundrel, Don Giovanni.

Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, in its new production by Marco Arturo Marelli, features excellent singing from top to bottom, tight orchestral playing, beautiful lighting, and a decisive lack of cowboys, saloons and other “Wild West” clichés. Set in a modern-day mining village in the middle of somewhere vast and gorgeous, the production focuses on the social interplay and struggles of the miners.

Goethe’s epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (“The Sorrows of Young Werther”) hit the 1774 zeitgeist not only because it brought back emotion to the rather sober Age of Enlightenment, but because the tragic title hero sports a multi-faceted character that lends itself to various interpretations and projections, therefore making it easy to feel sympathy or even partly identify with the