In love with an exiled count turned pirate, a young woman has been forced into a marriage with his worst enemy. Is there a way out of this dramatic love triangle?
Il pirata marked the beginning of young Bellini's fruitful collaboration with the librettist Felice Romani, called 'the Dante of his time', and of an international career as dazzling as it was short. Abandoning the tradition of happy endings, the gothic plot culminates in one of the first ‘mad scenes’ in the history of opera.

Her beauty has conquered his strength. But when a hero, blinded and beaten, is called by a higher power to rescue his people from oppression, he discovers that his faith is the greatest strength of all.

This weekend, fall in love with Camille Saint-Saëns’s most seductive masterpiece: the biblical epic Samson and Delilah.

Grammy-winning mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina wields the shears as the infamous Delilah, in a seductive performance the San Francisco Chronicle calls “lithe and lustrous, with a sinewy strength that cut easily through the orchestral texture.”

She stars opposite dramatic tenor Clifton Forbis, who delivers a company debut that’s virtuous, powerful and pure as the clarion-voiced hero Samson, under the baton of celebrated conductor Patrick Summers.

Experience the opera that blends the heat of lust with the heavenly harmonies Saint-Saëns is famous for, this weekend only, starting Saturday, January 23, at 10am Pacific. Directed for the screen by Frank Zamacona.

Stefan Hertmans and Kate Tempest rewrote these classic myths in a contemporary idiom and placed them in an urban context. Director Guy Cassiers tells the stories in a double bill of monologues.
From their isolated positions, Antigone and Tiresias each expose the suppressed sexual, social and political prejudices in society. Besides the visual technology, music also plays an important role. The two narratives enter into a dialogue with String Quartet No. 15 by the Russian composer Dmitri Sjostakovitsj.

Antigone in Molenbeek
Stefan Hertmans places Antigone in the midst of contemporary multicultural society. Here, Antigone’s name is Nouria and she is a law student. One of her brothers had turned radical, gone to the Middle East, fought for ISIS and now has died in a terrorist attack. Nouria is determined to bury the remains of her brother. When authorities refuse to release his body, everything goes wrong.

Tiresias
In Tempest’s spoken poem, Tiresias is a fifteen-year-old boy who transforms into a woman and ultimately turns into a prophet that no one listens to. A role that is cut out for actress Katelijne Damen, with whom Guy Cassiers previously made the production Orlando, after Virginia Woolf. Like Tiresias, Orlando told the story of a transformation from man to woman and pointedly asked all sorts of questions about identity.