On Wednesday, October 16th, Dmitri Hvorostovsky's birthday, the Festival officially opens with a performance of Giuseppe Verdi's Messa da Requiem.

The essence of Verdi’s Requiem can be found in the words Libera me - “Free me”. The great composer employs every means at his disposal to portray man as prisoner of himself, with both his fear of death and yearning for salvation. Recording Dates: 14…

Haendel composed only episodically for the church: the Dixit Dominus is a psalm written during his stay in Rome, based on the Venetian models with borrowed Gregorian singing. We are stroke by the wealth of the words we hear: emotion pierces the mind…

Copernicus, the man behind the title of the opera, brought the revolution that radically changed man’s way of seeing things, shifting from the earth to the sun and its sacred flames. Barely a few stories – for there is no dramatic conflict here, no…

The late French composer Pierre Henry was among the pivotal forces behind the development of musique concrète, becoming the first formally educated musician to devote his energies to the electronic medium. His final work Dracula was originally…

Monteverdi’s iconic opera articulates Orpheus’ attempts to soothe the keepers of Hades with his voice and his lyre. He is allowed to release his beloved Eurydice from the realm of the dead, on the one condition that he does not turn around to look at…

A founding text of German operatic Romanticism and an absolute masterpiece of musical theatre, Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber has not been performed at La Scala since 1998, when it was conducted by Donald Runnicles, but it is worthwhile…

Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707) is considered today one of the founding fathers of the 17th century German school, whose influence on composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, his spiritual son, cannot be overestimated. Not only was he an indisputable…

For the Easter Festival 2017 in Baden-Baden, Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker draw their inspiration from Tosca, the most well-known and also most brilliant of all the Puccini operas. And that is deservedly so, since Tosca is not…

The Verbier Festival Orchestra, under the baton of one of the greatest Mahlerians of our time, Michael Tilson Thomas, perform the Austrian composer’s Symphony No. 3 in D Minor, an ode to nature. This concert, the climax of the 2016 Verbier Festival…