The great soldier Orlando is lovesick and shows little intention of resuming his former glorious and heroic deeds. When Orlando enters, he is a man clearly torn between his love of fame and his love for Angelica. "Orlando teaches all of us that love is often responsible for our loss of reason," runs a line from Act 3 of the opera. It is a modest moral, and perhaps one not demanding of the dramatic finesse and musical diversity that Handel serves up in Orlando - for the opera's complex of problems is rather more complicated than that. Beneath the fabric of this masterfully woven constellation of characters and values is a score of such independence and vivacity as to give Orlando a special position among Handel's works - indeed among opera literature in general.

Olga Peratyatko and Atalla Ayan star in Rolando Villazón's scintillating production of Verdi's La Traviata at the Festspielhaus in Baden Baden, Germany. Supported by the Balthasar-Neumann-Chor and the Balthasar-Neumann-Ensemble.