Marija Kuhar Šoša

On 8 December 1980, a murder stirred the modern world. Britain’s most famous member of The Beatles was gunned down at the entrance to his residence in New York. What turned a fan into the killer of the man he adored? Composer Ivo Josipović - and none other than Croatia’s former President - has had a very rich musical career alongside one in politics. He has written over 50 chamber music pieces for various instruments, chamber orchestra and symphony orchestra as well as serving as director of the contemporary music festival, Music Biennale Zagreb. The fate of John Lennon has intrigued the composer and with librettist Marina Biti, the pair have created an opera built around the last days of the Beatle, the people who were important to him and a psychological profile of his murderer. For the world premiere at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, the conductor is Ivan Josip Skender and director Marina Pejnović.

The most brilliant of Austrian operettas takes us to the outskirts of romantic Old Vienna. It’s New Year Eve and we are in the company of Rosalinde, who is determined to teach her philandering husband Eisenstein a lesson, even while she is being pursued by her former beau, the operatic tenor Alfred. At the centre of the action is the extremely wealthy, eternally bored Prince Orlofsky, whose lavish masked ball brings everything to a most delicious boil. But what if the whole plot has been a cunning plan masterminded by someone just to get back at Eisenstein? Die Fledermaus, Johann Strauss II’s comic operetta in three acts which premiered in 1874, has become a synonym of the operetta genre.