Both Florez and Diana Damrau brought their bel canto expertise and superb vocalism to the service of Verdi's music. The Rigoletto, Zeljko Lucic, ran the gamut from tenderness with his Gilda to thundering fury with everyone else. I also liked the production. At first, when Rigoletto was putting on his grease paint during the overture, I was afraid that it might be a typical "Euro-trash" production,...

Mieczyslaw Weinberg's powerful Holocaust drama Die Passagierin channels his and his family's ordeals of wartime and Soviet persecution, applying them musically to Zofia Posmysz's autobiographical novel.