Salzburger Festspiele [ENA] Every so often — perhaps once a decade — an opera evening arrives that does not so much end as continue inside you on the walk home, on the following morning, in the weeks after. Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise has always been one of those works in potential that became fact. This is Salzburg's new production, directed and designed by Romeo Castellucci and conducted by Maxime Pascal.   [Full story...]

ImpulsTanz Festival [ENA] There is a small, luminous tradition of dance made in mourning for its own photographers, and Captura y fuga — José Manuel Álvarez's solo for the Vienna festival at the Kasino am Schwarzenbergplatz — joins it with unusual grace. The piece is a choreographic monument to René Robert, the Swiss-French photographer who spent fifty years documenting the great cantaores, guitarristas and bailaores of of flamenco.   [Full story...]