Performer: Arnold Rawls

This summer’s production of Bizet’s Carmen on the Seebühne stage in Bregenz offers a great spectacle. 

Two mountain-themed operas were performed recently in Dallas, including the much-anticipated world première of Joby Talbot's Everest. 

Simultaneously one of the most loved and most mocked operas in the canon, Il trovatore has some of Verdi’s catchiest melodies set to one of his silliest plots. Against the backdrop of a 15th-century Spanish war, a cast of nobles, gypsies, nuns and soldiers enact a drama which hinges on that hoariest of dramatic clichés: children swapped at birth.