The Pearl Fishers, Le Nozze de Figaro

English National Opera takes Bizet into a disaster zone, but two tasty Figaros offer a feast for Mozart loversBizet wrote Les Pêcheurs de Perles in his mid-20s, nearly a decade before his masterpiece, Carmen. He may have thought he had created an operatic bouillabaisse hot with eastern delight and heady religiosity, spiced up with a love triangle and good tunes. Romantic orientalism, awkwardly outmoded today, was the rage in 1860s Paris and the young Frenchman yielded, like so many fellow artis...

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