Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. A rare opera needs its champions. Somebody at Opera Holland Park clearly loves Mascagni’s Iris, a pioneering Japanese ...

Osaka and Kyoto haggle over the unconscious Iris at Bard SummerScape. The libretto, by favorite Puccini collaborator Luigi Illica, is a wispy symbolist text telling of the virginal Tokyo slum dweller ...

For a nation that seems in permanent rehearsal for the return of Noah and his Ark it’s curious how we cling to the idea that every trip to hear opera in a sylvan setting will be a sun-kissed, bucolic ...

"Honourably" means, from director Olivia Fuchs's perspective, tackling head-on the distasteful plot in which a girl young enough still to be playing with dollies is drugged and carted off by a ...

Mascagni is something of a speciality at Opera Holland Park, where productions of L’amico Fritz, Zanetto and Cavalleria rusticana have appeared in recent years. The rarely performed Iris, however, has ...