Leonardo Da Vinci's portrait of La Gioconda, more familiarly known as the Mona Lisa has fascinated many writers, her famously inscrutable half-smile a powerful stimulus for imaginative interpretation, ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. To paraphrase Bill Clinton’s 1992 election campaign message, “It’s the voices, stupid.” The expression seems made for ...

Performances in N.Y.C. Advertisement Supported by In a new staging at La Scala, “La Gioconda” will capture the full range of human emotion in a dreamlike Venice, with dashes of Kubrick and Fellini. By ...

2 Opera San José to Bring Free Outdoor Concert to San José Municipal Rose Garden Amilcare Ponchielli's opera La Gioconda (no link whatsoever with the painting in the Louvre) is one of those works too ...

In his preface to Angelo, Tyrant of Padua, one of his rare prose plays, Victor Hugo says that drama has to be both noble and real. In transposing the play to operatic form, Amilcare Ponchielli and ...

Creditable, if uneven attempt at one of the biggest challenges in Italian opera The grand passions and dastardly intrigue of La Gioconda have held the stage in Italy, and Grange Park Opera’s new ...

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Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. La Gioconda is a wonderfully terrible opera, a compendium of shameless clichés cloaked in glorious melody. On ...

Opera Holland Park often succeeds best when challenging itself with pieces totally unsuitable for its al fresco situation and modest resources. So it goes with this vastly enjoyable bash at Ponchielli ...

There's an odd moment at the end of the second act of Martin Lloyd-Evans's production of Ponchielli's melodrama, when the spy Barnaba, extinguishing the torch with which the exiled prince Enzo is ...