Artiste: Jan Cornelius

The 2012 Fort Worth Opera Festival, now nearing its conclusion, presented the last of its three performances of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro on Friday evening. A traditional approach governed everything from the modest yet handsome sets to the conservative musical interpretation.

While recordings of Arabella abound, operagoers could conceivably go years without actually seeing the piece performed. Compared to the frequency with which companies present Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, and Salome, Richard Strauss’s Arabella is an infrequently seen gem.