A dazzling one-act opera, a journey into the psyche of a betrayed woman, consumed by rage and abandonment—feelings that awaken ancient, blood-soaked codes of honour. If Giovanni Verga’s eponymous novella has, over time, shaped the imagination of all Sicilian dramas of jealousy, this is also due to the music of Pietro Mascagni: direct, immediate, rough, with a special luminosity in evoking the landscape of the small town of Vizzini and a sudden violence in the eruption of passions. The emotional impact on the listener has endured since, to quote Sciascia, “the cry ‘they have killed compadre Turiddu’ for the first time sent a shiver down the spine of opera lovers.”

Cavalleria rusticana

Teatro Regio di Torino

Ruggero Leoncavallo claimed that the story of Pagliacci was true: a murder he himself, as a child, allegedly witnessed being committed by a killer dressed as a clown. At the beginning of the opera, a character—the Prologue—feels compelled to warn us that everything we are about to see is not fiction, as in a traditional disclaimer, but a genuine “slice of life.” But is it really so? Where does the boundary between reality and representation lie? And is that fragile boundary enough to save a life in danger?

Pagliacci

Puccini was not the only composer to write an opera based on the Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger: Ruggero Leoncavallo also, in those same years, devoted an opera to the adventures, pranks, loves, and sorrows of the young bohemians of Paris. Time has favored Puccini’s version, which has remained firmly in the repertoire, while Leoncavallo’s version, premiered a year later in 1897, has been forgotten. Right here at the Regio, the birthplace of Puccini’s masterpiece, La bohème by Leoncavallo is presented again to the public in a rare staging, offering the chance to observe Marcello, Rodolfo, Colline, Schaunard, and a city teeming with life from a different perspective—one more faithful to Murger’s text and perhaps also more realistic, yet with music that does not forgo melodic effusion, a taste for pastiche, and the rapid succession of moments of playful lightness and dramatic intensity: all elements in which the composer of Pagliacci has few rivals. The female characters also include Eufemia, who joins the contrasting figures of Mimì and Musetta, portrayed respectively by Francesca Dotto and Anna Goryachova. Rodolfo and Marcello have vocal roles reversed compared to Puccini’s version: here the tenor is Marcello, performed by Matteo Lippi, while Rodolfo is the baritone Alessandro Luongo. With this production, Francesco Micheli offers a further interpretation of Leoncavallo’s theatrical universe and the bohemian story. From the podium, Andrea Battistoni continues his exploration of Italian musical verismo.

La bohème

No use beating around the bush: Mascagni’s operas following Cavalleria rusticana all different from one another have been overshadowed by the fame of the first. A fate in many ways unjust given their musical quality. Iris is one of these hidden gems: first performed in 1898 it is the first example of an Italian opera set in Japan and anticipates some ideas that would soon appear in Madama Butterfly (moreover with the same librettist Luigi Illica). But unlike Puccini’s Mascagni’s Japan is idealized and completely detached from reality as befits a symbolist drama: in an idyllic place among flowers bamboo and streams two agents of evil lie in wait. The victim is a young girl whom Illica and Mascagni follow with masterful skill through the tortuous paths of her mind where dreams and memories of childhood collide with the horror of the world the abduction for the purpose of sexual abuse and finally the agony on the mysterious boundary between life and death. Their creation explores an intimate side of femininity in this case transfigured in a symbolic key.

Iris

Under the baton of Music Director Andrea Battistoni, the Orchestra del Teatro Regio plunges into a whirlwind of mystery and sensuality. The enveloping, exotic scents of Saint-Saëns’ Bacchanale give way to the tragic intensity of Berlioz, whose La Mort de Cléopâtre paints the supreme and fatal ecstasy of the Queen of Egypt — brought to life by the suave voice and breathtaking vocal virtuosity of mezzo-soprano Antoinette Dennefeld. The concert then transforms into a celebration of sweeping rhythms, featuring music from two ballets radiating Iberian passion: the three dances from Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, with their proud Andalusian spirit, and Ravel’s hypnotic and overwhelming Boléro.

Rapture

It opens with the highly anticipated return of the celebrated dance gala featuring Roberto Bolle alongside numerous international performers.

Roberto Bolle and Friends

The first tour of the Tokyo Ballet, founded by the legendary Tadatsugu Sasaki, took place sixty years ago in Moscow and Leningrad, and passed the most rigorous test in the country of the masterpieces of Petipa’s great repertoire. The tours have now reached thirty-six, with performances throughout Europe, at La Scala as well as at the Paris Opéra, the original cradles of ballet, but also in Buenos Aires and Beijing. In Tokyo, Vladimir Vasiliev of the Bolshoi staged Don Quixote and Natalia Makarova, a sublime figure of the Mariinsky, La Bayadère. However, choreography by twentieth-century authors is also well represented in the Japanese company’s portfolio, with Kylián, Neumeier, Ek, Forsythe, and Teshigawara. The Tokyo Ballet’s repertoire also includes twenty-two works by Maurice Béjart, the demiurge of neoclassical-modern ballet who, from Brussels, shaped the postwar era worldwide. For the company, the Marseilles-born master created The Kabuki (1986), drawing on that glorious traditional Japanese total theater genre—with its stories of courageous samurai and geishas—which some young people today, bored in nightclubs, find themselves embodying, captivated by katanas, percussion, and kimonos. He later conceived M (1993) for the Tokyo Ballet, based on the life of Yukio Mishima, and personally entrusted them with Le Sacre du Printemps and Boléro, which have made history with audiences around the world.

The Tokyo Ballet

The Nutcracker has now become a true family ballet: Christmas, which brings everyone together around festive tables, always draws crowds of new young spectators who discover it alongside adults delighted to accompany them on a journey through gifts, dances, nightmares, and the final triumph of love, set to Tchaikovsky’s enchanting music.

The Nutcracker

Davide “Boosta” Dileo is far more than just a co-founder of Subsonica: he is an internationally acclaimed keyboardist and electronic music composer who creates a unique sonic universe in each of his pieces. For the Filarmonica TRT, he has created Horae, a meditation on the passage of time brought to life through a dialogue between orchestra, piano, and synthesizer. Ensuring a perfect balance between digital beats and classical phrasing is Maestro Valentino Corvino, a versatile conductor with a unique sensitivity for blending classical, pop, and electronic music.

Fusions

Edgar is many firsts. It marks the first time Puccini tackled a libretto of broad scope, following the smaller-scale debut of Le Villi. It is also the first time he set to music a subject in a medieval setting, with a chivalric and military tone that would remain unique in his output. And it is the first time he assigned a woman the role of an antagonistic virago, with the formidable (already from her name) Tigrana: a soprano of similar ferocity would only appear again with Turandot, at the end of his artistic journey.

Edgar

It may seem paradoxical, but one of the titles in which Vivaldi’s theatrical talent can be best appreciated is not intended for the stage. Juditha triumphans is in fact an oratorio (the only one by its composer that has survived), intended for a concert performance. More precisely, a “sacred military oratorio,” since it was written in 1716 to celebrate the victory of the Republic of Venice in defence of Corfu, a Venetian possession, besieged by the Turks. The biblical episode of Judith beheading Holofernes thus provides the pretext for an allegorical representation: Venice–Judith, Corfu–Bethulia, and Turks–Assyrians. An allegory which, in Vivaldi’s hands, becomes material from which recitatives, arias, and choruses in an operatic style emerge with ever-renewed freshness. The sumptuousness of the vocal lines—written entirely for female voices, partly en travesti—is unsurprising, given that the singers of the first performance were the orphans of the :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}, which provided women with an exceptional musical education, and where Vivaldi had recently been appointed “maestro de’ concerti.” Nor is the orchestral splendour surprising, since, in addition to the singers, the composer also had at his disposal equally virtuosic female instrumentalists. What is more striking, rather, is his ability to vividly depict actions and emotions that seem visible even without sets or costumes, his imaginative instrumental combinations, and the way the music fits the already highly musical Latin verses of Giacomo Cassetti, giving them full theatrical meaning. In the city that preserves almost all of Vivaldi’s manuscripts, the welcome return of Gianluca Capuano, a specialist in Baroque repertoire, takes place after his acclaimed performance last season at the :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1} in Die Entführung aus dem Serail.

Juditha triumphans

An authentic legend of our time, Grigory Sokolov embodies the purest essence of pianism: his is an art that rejects compromise and lives solely in the unrepeatable moment of the concert. An inspiration that, for the first time, is part of the Teatro Regio’s season, for an evening that sees him as the absolute protagonist. Appreciated equally by connoisseurs and enthusiasts alike for the almost mystical intensity of his performances and for his boundless knowledge of the piano repertoire, the artist has a very intimate relationship with music: “I do not play on demand,” he declared in an interview, “I only play what I wish to play, or rather, only what I wish to play at that very moment. Every piece must arouse in me a burning desire.”

Absolute

An evening looking East, to the borders between history and legend, led by one of the most magnetic talents of the new generation, Emmanuel Tjeknavorian. The young Viennese conductor of Armenian descent has crafted a program that weaves together his family heritage and the great Russian tradition. At the heart of the concert is Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9, composed in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet victory in World War II; framing this masterpiece of irony and lightness are two compositions of epic proportions: the Suite from the opera Rostam and Sohrab by his father, Loris Tjeknavorian, inspired by an ancient Persian poem, and Borodin’s dazzling Polovtsian Dances.

Horizons

Director Jacopo Spirei returns to the Regio to reinterpret another great classic, after the success of Hamlet, and he does so together with set designer Gary McCann and costume designer Giada Masi, winners of the 2025 Abbiati Prize for their work on Thomas’s opera.

La traviata

An anthem to life that unites the earthly and the sacred. Music Director Andrea Battistoni has selected two rare and precious works of dazzling energy: Sinigaglia’s Piemonte and Mascagni’s Messa di Gloria. The suite by the Turin-born maestro gives voice to the simple joys of rural life, from springtime games to Carnival pranks, reimagining Piedmontese folk songs with the sumptuous colors of the symphonic orchestra. The Messa will be a delightful discovery for fans of Cavalleria rusticana, who will find the same sense of spontaneous religiosity in a more extended and elaborate form, with an explosion of lyricism brought to life by the superb voices of Dmitry Korchak and Franco Vassallo.

Glory

Not a simple reduction of Carmen by Georges Bizet, but a true rewriting by one of the great masters of twentieth-century theatre, Peter Brook. His aim is to bring an opera to life by stripping away all decorative elements, conventions, and the rhetoric typical of melodrama, and to dig deeply into the theatrical material to reach directly the stark, raw truth of a tragedy conceived in the ancient Greek sense.

La Tragédie de Carmen

Piccolo Regio Giacomo Puccini

The biblical episode is well known: during a banquet, Princess Salome dances for Herod and he promises her anything in return; the young woman asks for and obtains the head of John the Baptist. In 1891, Oscar Wilde turned the story into a drama, enriched with new elements, which enjoyed great success in Germany and consolidated the image of Salome as a combination of innocence and perversion. Richard Strauss, in search of a subject for a new opera, did not let it slip away and set Wilde’s text (translated into German) to music as it stood, with only minor changes.

Salome

An immersion into a shimmering sonic universe, where music turns into light and motion. An undisputed specialist in the Belle Époque repertoire—whose infinite refractions she masterfully brings to the fore—Ariane Matiakh makes her debut on the podium of the Regio. Together with the Filarmonica TRT, she breathes new life into the soft atmospheres and misty, static landscapes of Koechlin’s Au loin, the vivid hues of Roussel’s neoclassical ballet Bacchus et Ariane, and the poetic enchantment of Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande, inspired by a symbolist drama with a dreamlike setting. Finally, the crepuscular swirl of Ravel’s La Valse offers a nostalgic homage to a carefree world that vanished after the First World War.

Iridescent

His friends recount that when Puccini finished writing La bohème, he gathered them around the piano to let them hear it. Deeply moved, they exclaimed: this opera is about us, it is us! More than a century has passed, and even today we can say the same: this story speaks of the dreams we whisper to ourselves in the mirror, of the desires and regrets that keep us awake at night, of all the great and small losses we have endured, of the winters and summers of a lifetime. Can we love knowing that one day what we love will no longer be there? How can one go on living when death takes away what is most dear to you? And what remains of those we have loved, of all that immense love?

La bohème, first love

For Tchaikovsky, fate is a blind and oppressive force, evoked by the dark fanfare of horns that opens his Symphony No. 4; in Debussy and Chausson it takes on the more elusive traits of dream and memory, from the sensual suspension of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune to the poignant nostalgia of the Poème de l’amour et de la mer. A journey that weaves the light of French impressionism together with the pathos of Russian symphonism, led by the baton of Nicolò Umberto Foron, a young musician with an already dazzling career. Mezzo-soprano Alisa Kolosova, a refined interpreter of great expressive intensity, lends her voice to Chausson’s setting of Maurice Bouchor’s poetry.

Destiny

We have all encountered Carmen. It is the name of that force that sweeps away perfectly ordered plans, rules, and habits; that force which embodies eros in its irresistible and absolute freedom. “Free was I born, and free shall I die,” says the woman who embodies it in this opera. What happens when fate places her before a brigadier who seems her exact opposite, the ideal type of the “good boy”? Under the Spanish sky, a universal story unfolds: a blinding conflict between passions that we witness taking shape every day—and sometimes tragically—before our eyes. Giving voice to them is the music of Georges Bizet, charged with energy like a coiled spring ready to strike.

Carmen

Nurtured in the fascinating Central European cultural melting pot of the late nineteenth century, the creations of Brahms and Dvořák share a similar musical language yet express very different temperaments. Felix Mildenberger, Principal Guest Conductor of the Filarmonica TRT since 2021, brings their works into contrast for a return to the roots of Romantic symphonism, where the noblest lyricism meets the raw energy of the earth. On one hand, Brahms’ Violin Concerto, performed by the brilliant violinist Anna Tifu, showcases a wonderful balance between virtuosity and poetry; on the other, Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8 is infused with Bohemian folk melodies and an irrepressible high spirit.

Roots

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky never had any illusions about the subject he wished to set to music for his fifth opera, Evgeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin. On several occasions, he shows himself aware of the presence of “very few stage effects, very little action” in a libretto made up of many “lyric scenes” (as he would later subtitle the opera) depicting life in 19th-century Russia, from jam-making in the countryside to a searing farewell dialogue in a palace in Saint Petersburg. What interests him is the powerful “inner drama” so well expressed in Pushkin’s verses—verses that he largely preserves. He is interested in the characters and their human condition: Onegin’s restlessness, Lensky’s “poet’s soul,” and above all the feelings that stir a woman: “I am in love,” he confesses, “with the character of Tatiana.” Anyone familiar with Tchaikovsky’s life can imagine why he felt so close to this melancholic girl, noble in spirit and destined to see all the love overflowing from her remain unfulfilled. It is no coincidence that the “Letter Scene,” in which she is the protagonist, is considered one of the composer’s peaks, capable here of expressing through music a whirlwind of otherwise inexpressible emotions. Yet every detail of this opera is of such beauty that, contrary to expectations, it has become Tchaikovsky’s most frequently performed work since its premiere in 1879.

Teatro Regio Torino

Oct 13 - Nov 21, 2026

Cavalleria rusticana

Oct 15 - Nov 21, 2026

Pagliacci

Oct 27 - Nov 22, 2026

La bohème

5 - 18 Nov, 2026

Iris

Nov 12, 2026

Rapture

Teatro Regio Torino