Ashley Putnam

Set in a scorching Brussels, Babel Opera blends documentary and fiction during the intense rehearsals of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. As an international cast struggles to bring the opera to life, four fictional characters appear around the set. Their real-life conflicts, infidelities, and passions begin to mirror the seductions of the opera itself, completely blurring the lines between art and reality as the grand premiere approaches.

Mozart's La Clemenza Di Tito was originally commissioned to celebrate the coronation of the Emperor Leopold II as King of Bohemia in 1791. This rarely-seen masterpiece was Mozart's last opera. Nicholas Hytner's elegant staging for the Glyndebourne Festival Opera sheds new light on the compelling story of passion that overrides loyalty and integrity that is tested to the extreme.

Street Scene is a Broadway musical or, more precisely, an "American opera" by Kurt Weill (music), Langston Hughes (lyrics), and Elmer Rice (book). It was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by Rice. For his work on Street Scene, Weill received the first Tony Award for Best Original Score. In Germany, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Weill had already begun to use American jazz and popular song elements in his operas. After fleeing from Germany in 1933, he worked in Paris, then England, and then, beginning in 1935, in New York. Weill made a study of American popular and stage music and worked to further adapt his music to new American styles in his writing for Broadway, film and radio. He strove to find a new way of creating an American opera that would be both commercially and artistically successful.