Il segreto di Susanna / Iolanta

How well do you know your husband? How well do you know your wife? Newly-weds Gil and Susanna learn a little more about each other in Wolf-Ferrari’s delicious 1909 farce of marital mistrust and modern manners.

Mozartian orchestral writing, a Chopinesque piano solo and an aria perfumed with the exotic fragrance of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune contrast with the turbulent Romanticism of Iolanta, Tchaikovsky’s final opera. A dark and beautiful fairy tale of isolation and enchantment, its blind heroine is redeemed through the love of the only man to tell her the truth. A romance as profound as Wolf-Ferrari’s comedy is light, Iolanta forms the second half of a double bill on the theme of secrets and lies.