This new production of Norma, directed by Grammy Award-nominated opera, theatre and film director Kevin Newbury (winner of the Irish Times Theatre Award 2010) and starring Sondra Radvanovsky as a "powerful, elegant" Norma (New York Times) and Gregory Kunde as Pollione, is "something very special. The word 'historic' is used perhaps a little too often but tonight there really is no other adjective to describe the sensational performances offered to us by Sondra Radvanovsky and Gregory Kunde."

Norma

This Wagner opera is rarely performed because of the scandals that engulfed the Magdeburg Theatre when it was performed in 1836 under the title The Novice of Palermo, and became known as a cursed opera from which the composer had to distance himself. Wagner's adaptation of the story reflects the rebellious mood of a Revolutionary Germany, vindicating sensual love and attack the fanatical repression of sexuality by a puritanical and hypocritical authority. As the prose says, "Shame to him whose cruel striking/Kills for faults of his own liking!". One of the most extraordinary musicals based on a text by Shakespeare, especially worthy of a new performance as it is four hundred years since the death of the Bard.

Das Liebesverbot

800 liters of water, two sails, thirty pulleys, sixty hammocks: for the Bicentenary of the Teatro Real of Madrid, Deborah Warner coined a colossal production of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd.

Billy Budd

The Pucchini opera "Turandot" will be shown completely new at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. The new production by the Spanish video artist Franc Aleu refers with a wink to the history of the Catalan institution: 20 years ago, this very opera was resumed there after a fire in 1994 severely damaged the theater.