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 ...

The curtain is going up on an extraordinary, operatic treat at Bard SummerScape. Like the mythic appearance of “Brigadoon” every hundred years, certain operatic flowers only find their full bloom a ...

"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 ...