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Pier Luigi Pizzi’s staging looks impressive but feels empty. Lidia Fridman’s Abigaille ignites the evening.

Franco Zeffirelli’s Aida – compact yet simultaneously monumental – is thrilling revived at the tiny Teatro Verdi in Busseto.

Manuel Renga directs a simple, but sympathetic production of Verdi's early opera set in 16th-century Peru. 

Boccanegra butchered in Parma? Only in the sense that director Valentina Carrasca sets the opera in an abattoir... 

All you need to stage Trovatore, according to Enrico Caruso, are “the four greatest singers in the world”. The Verdi Festival may have found the four loudest...

Audience protests against Roberto Abbado interrupt the opening night of the festival, Yannis Kokkos' staging of La forza del destino.

Traditionally, Italy's most unforgiving loggionisti are reputed to reside at Parma's Teatro Regio. Thankfully for the cast, they appear to be a dying breed.

When they asked Wilson to stage an opera by Verdi, the Texan director replied "I'll never do it!". Now he is at his fourth Verdi's production.

Not a particularly revealing Falstaff, but a pleasing performance though. Maybe one would have expected something of greater impact from a festival like this one, but that goal had already accomplished by Graham Vick with his Stiffelio the night before...

Without recourse to virtual reality or hallucinogens, Vick has created a suggestive, vividly surreal world where one's reference points are lost to the wind.