Movies: Florian Sempey

Divested of its traditional attributes – glass slipper and pumpkin carriage – and dominated by a tyrannical stepfather instead of a cruel stepmother, Rossini’s la Cenerentola plays with these most conventional of fairy‑tale characters. Nonetheless Ci...

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“Foolish indeed is he who marries in old age.” Thus ends Don Pasquale: with a wise dictum not lacking in irony that sums up the disappointments of its hero, a rich bachelor keen to marry who is deceived by his nephew Ernesto and his young bride-to-be...

Les Huguenots is a monumental fresco featuring various impossible loves in the context of the Saint Bartholomew Massacre. Andreas Kriegenburg places these timeless conflicts of love and religion in an immaculate setting in which the costumes appear y...

First performed in Paris in 1843, at the turning point of several eras, Don Pasquale, a composite and varied work, is the apotheosis of opera buffa. Performed for the first time at the Paris Opera, the production has been entrusted to the Italian dir...

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Puccini’s passionate opera is conducted by Antonio Pappano and stars a superb young cast including Nicole Car, Michael Fabiano and Mariusz Kwiecień, in a new production by Richard Jones....

This is Laurent Pelly’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées staging of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, with a cast featuring Florian Sempey as Figaro, Catherine Trottmann as Rosina, and Michele Angelini as Il Conte Almaviva. Jérémie Rhorer conducts Le Cer...

A staging of Charles Gounod's "Faust", staged by Tobias Kratzer....

A decade before the French Revolution, in a country riven with bitter polemics, Gluck throws the history of opera into confusion by raising it to an unheard-of peak of tragic intensity. Experiencing his two Iphigenias in a single evening goes beyond ...

Composed for the Paris Opéra, the romantic but ultimately tragic narrative of Donizetti’s grand opera La Favorite is set amidst the Moorish invasions of Spain and the power struggles between religion and the state in the 14th century. The novice Fern...

At the Teatro Real in Madrid, director Laurent Pelly and conductor Giacomo Sagripanti get to grips with Gioachino Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia (The Turk in Italy) – a delightful opera buffa teeming with colourful characters!...

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