La Traviata, one of the world's best-loved romantic operas is performed under the stars on a floating, mirrored stage in Sydney Harbor, with the city, Opera House and Harbor Bridge acting as a stunning backdrop. Giuseppe Verdi's captivating music is performed with the orchestra concealed in a studio beneath the stage to ensure the finest amplified sound combines with the superlative singing of the cast.

The Opéra Royal de Wallonie presents Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème. Stage director Stefano Mazzonis di Pralafera's production features a talented cast led by Patrizia Ciofi as Mimi and Gianluca Terranova as Rodolfo. Considered by some to be Puccini's best score, La Bohème is one of his best-known works. Premiered at Turin's Teatro Regio in 1896, the opera draws its plot from Henri Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème. The story is set in Paris' Latin Quarter, where comedy and tragedy live side by side, and its main characters live on a heady mixture of love, dreams, and disillusionment.

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.