The Latvian National Opera invites to visit annual Riga Opera Festival from June 5 to 17. Like every summer since 1998, the festival will bring to Riga brilliant guest conductors and avowed soloists in the most outstanding LNO productions of the last seasons.

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 majority of Riga Opera Festival 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 high quality of the opera's productions has been noted outside of the country, and has helped the opera to draw brilliant guest conductors and soloists to Riga.

Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor  will have its premiere just two weeks before the performances at the ROF on June 9 and 16. One of the most popular bel canto operas is set in Mussolini’s Italy – a visually imposing, beautifully monumental era, indifferent to human life and free will. In the title role – the celebrated Latvian soprano Marina Rebeka, who has triumphed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, the Royal Opera in London’s Covent Garden, the Teatro alla Scalain Milan and the Volksoper Wien. The performances will be conducted by Christoph Stiller from the Staatstheater Wiesbaden.

The highlights of the 2012 festival will be the impressive performances of Götterdämmerung, full of humour, tension, and references to the realities of Latvia. This final part of Richard Wagner’s monumental tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen will be conducted by the rising star in the classical music world Joana Mallwitz (June 10)and much-praisedmasterof Wagner’s music Cornelius Meister (June 17), regularly conducting at the leading opera companies of Europe and the States, including Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Paris, Vienna, Copenhagen, and San Francisco. The performances will be cast with internationally known Wagner singers, among them the Swedish tenor Lars Cleveman (greeted with rave reviews at the opera houses in London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Bayreuth), the British soprano Catherine Foster (performing regularly in Hamburg, Helsinki, Budapest, Weimar), and the charismatic Swedish baritone Marcus Jupither (singing in Oslo, Stockholm, Salzburg, Paris).

The ROF 2012 will also feature other internationally successful new LNO productions.  Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa (June 8 and 15), staged by the team from the Croatian National Theatre and inspired by the events in nowadays Ukraine, will star excellent Russian baritone Edem Umerov from the Mariinsky Theatre. Amazingly impressive multimedia opera War Sum Up (June 5), co-produced by Hotel Pro Forma (Denmark) and the Latvian Radio Choir, has been nominated for two awards in Denmark after the performances at the Royal Danish Theatre, the Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, the Odense Theatre and Musikhuset Aarhu in Denmark.

The best LNO productions from the 2010/11 season will be presented as well. The production of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (June 6 and 13), evaluated with 5 star review in the prestigious magazine Opera Now, represents clash of dream and reality in and around a large bed, serving as a symbolic image. In the production of Gioacchino Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia (June 7 and 12), awarded the Latvian Great Music Award as the Best Production of the Year, the bloody French Revolution has became ironic background to one of the most brilliant comic operas ever. 

Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polish Requiem – an impressive musical journey into darkest depths of the 20^th century history – will be performed at the ROF Concert on June 14by the wonderful guest soloists from Poland Wioletta Chodowicz, Agnieszka Rehlis, Rafal Bartminski and Marek Gasztecki under the baton of Gabriel Chmura, the artistic director of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.

The patron of the Riga Opera Festival 2012 

The informative supporter of the Riga Opera Festival 2012