Venue: Teatro Regio di Torino, Turin

The staging sways between tackiness and naivety, like those old Christmas cards with sequins glued to the edges of the figures.

The Teatro Regio presents a Classical rarity with echoes of Mozart and anticipations of Rossini. Diego Fasolis conducts with imagination and spunk.

Female voices dominate in the vocal cast: Rachel Willis-Sørensen debuts as Leonora and charms the audience; Anna Maria Chiuri has the temperament and rich vocality requested by the role of the gypsy.

Diego Fasolis gives an enlightened, 18th-century account of the Mozart/da Ponte masterpiece, with great precision and elegance.

Two different variations of the female conditions: one of 1909 and now utterly out-of-date, the second of 1959 much more ut-to-date.

The director presents the story clearly enough, but apart from that, there is not much going for this production.

In the Teatro Regio's production everything is according to the script, but the magic of the stage is absent.