The premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Il trovatore will take place at the Latvian National Opera on May 30.

Music director of the new production is Aleksandrs Viļumanis, conductor – Jānis Liepiņš. Creative team includes Stage Director Andrejs Žagars, Set Designer Reinis Dzudzilo, Costume Designer Kristīne Pasternaka, Light Designer Kevin Wyn-Jones, and Dramaturge Mikus Čeže.

The cast of Il trovatore includes Anna Nechaeva or Yulianna Bawarska as Leonora, Olesya Petrova or Andžella Goba as Azucena, Murat Karahan as Manrico, and Jānis Apeinis or Igor Golovatenko as Count Luna.

The gypsy woman Azucena, whose mother was burned at the stake, wants to take revenge on Count di Luna for all she has suffered. She kidnaps one of the Count’s sons and raises him as her own, all the while plotting her revenge. Many years later, Manriko, the troubador raised by gypsies, doesn’t realize that his greatest opponent in the race to capture the heart of the woman he loves is his own brother – the young Count di Luna. Il Trovatore was a grand success for Giuseppe Verdi and still maintains its place in the golden classics of opera repertoire. The LNO production is set in the Latvia, in 1919, after the World War I.

Dramaturge of the production Mikus Čeže: ‘Latvia, devastated in the events of the first part of WWI, with all the historic confusion and the atmosphere of indecision, reigning it, with equally horrifying “red” and “white” forms of terror, with ideologically and socially divided society and complete uncertainty about the nature of present and future events, all of this is a historic background, appropriate for the narrative spirit of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il trovatore”. Therefore, the interpretive space of the production is a castle on a front line between the “Landesver” and Bolshevik forces, which changes its hosts during winter and spring battles of 1919, finds itself conquered and lost and re-conquered.’

Further performances on May 31, June 7 and 14.

Tickets at the LNO and Biļešu Paradīze trade spots, and at www.bilesuparadize.lv