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The Maggio postpones Pountney’s expected new production of Don Giovanni, presenting Ferrara’s production from Spoleto instead, with a good cast in the hands of Zubin Mehta.

Five highly dissatisfied lead characters find only disastrous or ambiguous outcomes. Yet there are few greater operas than this.

A lively and amusing Barbiere at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, with Daniele Gatti expertly marshalling the talents of Ruzil Gatin, Vasilisa Berzhanskaya, Nicola Alaimo and Fabio Capitanucci in Damiano Michieletto's colourfully minimalist staging.

For the 84th edition of its summer festival, the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino presents its first ever production of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette.

Sven-Eric Bechtolf's staging holds a balance between philosophy and humour, but Adam Fischer's vivacious conducting is the real star of the evening.

The Maggio Musicale Fiorentino’s proposal is fully commendable, as they restored an opera rarely performed

Three Russian singers star in a revival of the Italian director's academy production from 2003. 

Risurrezione is a work whose value is to be found more in the orchestra than in the vocal lines, a peculiar thing for an Italian opera belonging to an epoch that gloried in enticing melodies.

The imaginative baroque architecture of the Buontalenti Grotto in Palazzo Pitti Boboli Gardens is an inert background to the action in this reprise of one of the first operas.

Marco Tullio Giordana's new production at the Maggio Musicale may be static, but musically there's much to enjoy in this rare slice of middle-period Verdi.

The in-house orchestra played out of its skin under Fabio Luisi.

Commissioned as an operetta, La rondine became a true opera instead, and was presented in 1917 in Montecarlo at the high point of WW1.

Metastasio's Didone abbandonata has been set to music at least sixty times. Florence revives a version by Leonardo Vinci composed in 1726.

In a staging new to Florence, the action is often merely a set of friezes, singers immobilised on a pair of moving plinths. 

The two Danieles – Gatti and Abbado – triumphed in the final opera of the 78th Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, with a heavenly new production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.