Stage Access Host Kelsey Grammer introduces the Rossini Opera Festival which the New York Times has written "may be the world's most charming annual opera event."

Il barbiere di Siviglia, an opera buffa in two acts, is one of the best known works composed by Gioachino Rossini. The Italian libretto by Cesare Sterbini is based on the French comedy The Barber of Seville (1775). Legendary director Pier Luigi Pizzi presents a triumph from the Rossini Opera Fest...

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the premiere of Ricciardo e Zoraide, the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro staged the Rossini rarity in 2018 with an all-star cast. Juan Diego Flórez makes his debut as the crusader Ricciardo, giving a "masterclass in bel canto" (Bachtrack) and Pretty Yende is...

Apart from its overture, the spirited opera L’Italiana in Algeri - the most “buffo” of Rossini’s buffo operas - had long been neglected on opera and concert stages. In honor of its 200th anniversary, it returned to the Rossini Opera Festival with Davide Livermore’s “virtuoso production rich in co...

The Rossini Opera Festival 2020 brings a delightful new production of Rossini’s early work La cambiale di matrimonio (The Marriage Contract) to the stage. Particularly noteworthy is the excellent young cast, mainly singers from the Pesaro-based Accademia Rossiniana. Written in 1810, Rossini’s one...

This musical comedy based on Carlo Goldoni’s play Il matrimonio per concorso has lost none of its appeal almost two centuries after its 1816 premiere at the Teatro dei Fiorentini. In La Gazzetta, a newly-rich merchant places newspaper advertisements to find a suitable husband for his daughter, wh...

Rossini was only 20 years old when he wrote his fifth opera, Ciro in Babilonia (Cyrus in Babylon), for the Teatro Comunale Ferrara in 1812. Davide Livermore's staging from the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, sets the action in the 1920s with period black-and-white film inserts, lavish costumes ...

Written in French in 1828 for the Paris Opéra, Le Comte Ory has maintained its popularity and success to this day. Re-using some of the music from his Viaggio a Reims, Rossini turns the disguise-based libretto into a spirited play of erotic lightness by creating what one critic called “the most i...

Set in medieval Italy, Rossini’s rarely performed Adelaide di Borgogna (Adelaide of Burgundy) first produced in 1817 at the Teatro Argentina, Roma is based on dramatic historical events that led to Otto the Great (Ottone) of Germany conquering the Kingdom of Italy. Despite its political and warli...

Demetrio e Polibio was Rossini's very first opera. Written when he was a teenager, it premiered in Rome in 1812 and revived at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro in 2010. Director Davide Livermore turns the libretto into a ghost story, setting the action at night, behind the stage of an opera h...

Rossini’s “Guillaume Tell” (1829) is an early example of romantic French Grand Opera and with its lavish musical writing and patriotic themes, the work itself set new musical and dramaturgical standards anticipating the music of Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and even Wagner. At the renowned Rossini F...

Premiered in 1814, this rarely revived opera staged at the 2010 Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro was hailed by the press as a "perfect symbiosis of music and stage work" that yields "truly brilliant" theater. Early Rossini has something buoyant and vibrant about it – even when it is a dramma per ...

Juan Diego Flórez returns to the opera few tenors dare sing in Mario Martone's production of Matilde di Shabran for the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro. Underpinned by a plot of "almost Shakespearean depth" (The Guardian), Rossini's melodramma giocoso features some of the most virtuosic vocal mu...

L'equivoco stravagante (The Bizarre Misunderstanding) is one of Rossini's earliest operas, written in 1811 when he was only 19 years old. The title of Rossini's first dramma giocoso in two acts refers to a misunderstanding and false story spread by a scheming servant. He deceives the suitor, Bura...

Celebrated tenor Juan Diego Flórez stars in the first production of Rossini's Zelmira on film - a rarely performed opera regarded as one of Rossini's most musically complex works. Flórez is joined by a dazzling cast, headed by Kate Aldrich in the title role, Gregory Kunde (Antenore) and Alex Espo...

Welcome to Rossiniland, a 21st-century Rossini theme park where the 1800s meet the 2000s and tourists are free to wander and gawp at the scintillating spectacle taking place around them. Innovative theatre company Teatro Sotterraneo transferred Rossini's light-hearted one-act operatic farce to a ...

Il Turco in Italia (The Turk in Italy), an opera buffa in two acts, is one of Rossini's wittiest works. This renewed production staged at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro 2016 is a lively performance interpreted by an ideal ensemble cast featuring Erwin Schrott, making his Pesaro debut, and t...

In this colorful and exuberant production by Damiano Michieletto, the comical farce becomes an Almodóvaresque spectacle that "transforms all the singers into extraordinary actors" (La Stampa). Rossini's one-act opera weaves a burlesque tale of secret husbands and would-be lovers where general hil...

Graham Vick's thought-provoking, modern-day interpretation of Rossini’s three-act opera Mosè in Egitto (Moses in Egypt) sets the scene for superior music-making at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro. For conductor Roberto Abbado, the transposition of the action to the present day releases the e...

Composed in 1818, yet not performed until 1826, Adina is the last of Rossini's one-act comic operas full of witty misunderstandings and trademark musical features including high C's for the tenor and stunning coloratura for the soprano. Staged at the Rossini Opera Festival, Pesaro, Italy in 2018,...

Rossini's work about love, war, and the jealous rivalry between the Roman emperor Aurelian and Prince Arsace of Persia over the rebellious Queen Zenobia of Palmyra first premiered in 1813 at La Scala. This award-winning 2014 Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro production staged by Mario Martone feat...