In Rossini’s best-loved opera, we meet a young couple besotted with one another and a cuckolding guardian who is determined to thwart their romance. The fixer who can help the lovers out of their predicament is a character beloved of theatre and opera who represents best of enlightenment values. He is, of course, the barber Figaro – a suave operator with an apparent ability to do everything, everywhere, all at once.

Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia is the supreme example of Rossini’s gift for melody, his lively rhythms and the sort of theatrical instincts that gave his comic operas a sparkle few others could get near. The Bergen National Opera, in collaboration with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Edvard Grieg Kor and conductor Peter Szilvay, present Rossini’s masterpiece – the opera in which the composer mobilized the beauty of the bel canto tradition, the skittering lightness of the Italian language and the brilliance of his own musical imagination to recapture the wit, bounce and satire of Pierre Beaumarchais’s scandalous original play.