With more than 50 years of experience as film director, Peter Greenaway (Nightwatching, Eisenstein in Guanajuato) combines the worlds of film and opera at the Verdi Festival in Parma, demonstrating what magic those two can do together with an all new approach to Giuseppe Verdi's Giovanna d'Arco, staged and edited by himself and his wife, Saskia Boddeke. The opera's libretto is based on Friedrich Schiller's 'The Maid of Orleans'. It tells the story of the French national hero Jeanne d'Arc, who defends her country against the English troops during the Hundred Years' War. Constantly torn between her humble roots, her love for King Charles VII and her heavenly task to fight for France, she gains eternal glory by giving her life in the final, victorious battle against England.

A tragic tale in which love and filial sentiment battle in a political intrigue around the fascinating character of Simon, a privateer become doge: Simon Boccanegra is one of Verdi’s greatest operas, over which floats the shadow of his admiration for Shakespeare. For this captivating and moving score, the Dijon Bourgogne Orchestra has called upon one of the great Verdi specialists, Roberto Rizzi Brignoli, whose Traviata in 2011 demonstrated his intimate and precise knowledge of the Italian master’s style, and the German stage director Philipp Himmelmann, a regular at Unter den Linden in Berlin and the great European stages.

Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida