This 70th anniversary Edinburgh International Festival feels nostalgic and retrospective, especially the opera programme. Although the Teatro Regio of Turin, one of Italy’s oldest opera companies, is bringing staged opera to the Scottish capital for the first time, the repertoire includes Verdi’s Macbeth, which was presented here by Glyndebourne in 1947, while John Eliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir trilogy of Monteverdi operas recalls the star-studded era of Peter Diamand, who brought over a celebrated Monteverdi “cycle” in 1978.
In the final days of this year’s festival, Teatro Regio unveiled its recent production of Puccini’s La bohème at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre in a modern-dress but basically traditional staging by Alex Olle. I wrote about it on the whole favourably from Turin last autumn.
The Teatro Regio’s