Performer: Julia Novikova

The King of Opera leads an inspired performance commemorating the 230th anniversary of Don Giovanni.

Young Russian soprano Julia Novikova performed twice at the Northern Lights Festival in Tromsø, the capital of northern Norway, this past week, treating the attentive and devoted audiences to a diverse set of songs.

Die Zauberflöte is a work whose outward simplicity masks internal complexity and even contradictions. Mozart’s music is childishly tuneful and yet reaches for the classically sublime; Emmanuel Schikaneder’s libretto alternates a magical quest story out of a German storybook with Masonic claptrap and secondhand Voltaire.