International

ABU DHABI – Four of the world’s leading young string players treated the Abu Dhabi Festival to effusive, radiantly virtuosic performances of miniature works by Schubert, Sibelius, and Glière that are seldom encountered in concert settings.

DUBAI – One of the seven members of the United Arab Emirates, this modern-day city-state, bursting with growth, is home to the InClassica International Music Festival, where concerts in a gorgeous opera house offered variable rewards.

VERSAILLES – Jean-Romain Vesperini’s brilliant and fizzy new production of La fille du régiment, for L’Opéra royal du château de Versailles, is a mix of wit, humor, and musical vitality. The ornate and lively 18th-century theater offers an added treat.

VIENNA – The one-act opera is being mounted at the Vienna State Opera for the first time since Gustav Mahler conducted it in the 1900-01 season. Soprano Sonya Yoncheva makes a vocally rich and nuanced role debut to head a stellar cast.

ADELAIDE – On its third artistic director in as many years, the 2025 Adelaide Festival reverted to a formulaic look that has sustained it through 64 years but still struck sparks with a Saariaho opera and a prodigious avant-garde flamenco work.

VIENNA – While productions at the Vienna State Opera and the Theater an der Wien are both very strong, in light of budget cuts across Europe, it would make sense for the latter, more intimate house to shift focus to operetta or the Baroque.

VIENNA – Das Spitzentuch der Königin (The Queen's Lace Handkerchief), a frothy operetta about a self-indulgent king-to-be in Portugal, received a bold staging at the Theater an der Wien to celebrate the composer born in 1825.

PARIS – From the Baroque to deconstructed Verdi and an 80th birthday salute to William Christie (right), a week in Paris offered insights into the presentation of vocal music, warhorse and rarity alike. In the mix, modernist works stood out.

VIENNA – Upon Arnold Schoenberg’s 150th birthday, in the city where premieres of his music set off public scandals, the annual festival Wien Modern set out to consider the relationship between experimental scores and community.

TOKYO – Kornilios Michailidis captured the 2024 Tokyo International Conducting Competition with a heated turn in Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. British conductor Riley Court-Wood was runner-up in this superbly organized triennial event.

PRAGUE – Jakub Hrůša led members of the Czech Philharmonic and Bamberg Symphony Orchestra on the exhibition grounds where the Seventh was first performed in 1908. Mahler's main language was German, but he was a native of Bohemia.

LUCERNE – A Rachmaninoff concert by the Lucerne Festival Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly hardly captured the composer, and a historically informed Walküre, brought from Dresden and led by Kent Nagano, seemed mainly an anomaly.

SALZBURG – This year’s Salzburg Festival boasts an impressive variety, from a new staging of Weinberg’s The Idiot, the summer's hit, to recitals and a concert treatment of Thomas’ opera Hamlet – in which the melancholy Dane is crowned king!

PARIS – Unheard at the Paris Opera since 1854, La vestale returned to the Bastille stage, entrusted to the fashionable, wildly imaginative American-born director Lydia Steier. She and dramaturg Olaf A. Schmitt clearly felt unbound by the original story.

MORETON-IN-MARSH, U.K. – The Longborough Festival, an upstart opera company located west of London, has pulled off a seriously professional effort in a 500-seat house. Anthony Negus led a fine, mostly British cast and a 60-piece orchestra.

BUCHAREST – While opera companies worldwide have acknowledged this year's centennial of the composer's death, the Bucharest Opera Festival presented eight staged productions and other events with 1,500 vocal and auxiliary participants.

LEIPZIG – The author, a regular contributor to Classical Voice North America, grew up singing in church choirs. He is a member of the Bach Cantata Choir of Portland, Ore., one of five U.S. choral groups invited to Leipzig's 2024 Bachfest.

PARIS – Even within director Lydia Steier's lurid concept of sensation for sensation's sake, Davidsen's stratospheric performance affirmed her place as the peerless soprano of her time in a diva legacy extending from Callas to Sutherland.

BERLIN – With his own orchestra called Utopia, 112 players from 20 countries including Russia and Ukraine, Teodor Currentzis led the mostly standing troupe in an assault on Bruckner's Ninth that left no room for spiritual transcendence.

ADELAIDE – To offset other risks, the venerable Adelaide Arts Festival offered two shows directed by favorites of the annual event, Robert Lepage's treatment of Stravinsky's The Nightingale and Barrie Kosky's setting of The Threepenny Opera.