The Riga Opera Festival, founded in 1998 as the first festival of its size and scale in Eastern Europe, has already become a valuable tradition. The festival is highly anticipated by both Latvian audiences and opera-lovers from abroad who form the biggest part of all Riga Opera Festival’s visitors. Every summer, the festival marks the end of the Latvian National Opera’s performance season with an overview of the best moments of the previous year, offering fans a chance to relive their favourite scenes or see what they’ve missed.

The Riga Opera Festival 2011 will take place on June 8–19. The festival offers the overview of the Latvian National Opera’s most successful productions. Along with some of the pearls of the LNO’s repertoire, „the golden repertoire” (Puccini’s Turandot and Madama Butterfly, Verdi’s Aida, Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer), this summer’s program includes the new productions of the season 2010/2011 – Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (cond. Modestas Pitrenas, dir. Aik Karapetian), Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (cond. Mikhail Tatarnikov, dir. Andrejs Žagars), and Latvian composer Bruno Skulte’s The Werevolves’ Heiress (cond. Andrejs Jansons and Aigars Meri, dir. Ināra Slucka), as well as some the most interesting productions of previous seasons (Puccini’s Il Trittico, Mozart’s Don Giovanni) and the Riga Opera Festival concert – Verdi's Requiem.