The festival will also feature this season’s new productions, multimedia opera War Sum Up, Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa and Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, as well as the productions from the 2010/11 season – Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia. Also the Polish Requiem by an outstanding contemporary Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki will be performed.
The Riga Opera Festival, founded in 1998 as the first festival of its size and scale in Eastern Europe, has already become a valuable tradition. The festival is highly anticipated by both Latvian audiences and opera-lovers from abroad, who form the majority of Riga Opera Festival visitors.
Every summer, the festival marks the end of the Latvian National Opera’s performance season with an overview of the best moments of the previous year, offering fans a chance to relive their favourite scenes or see what they’ve missed. The high quality of the opera's productions has been noted outside of the country, and has helped the opera to draw brilliant guest conductors and soloists to Riga.