The 11th edition of the BOV Opera Festival, which opens today and runs until March 24 at the Manoel Theatre, Valletta, will include a series of performances of popular works ranging from Rossini and Rachmaninoff to Handel and Puccini.

The first evenings will see a double bill of two performances: the operas Aleko by Sergei Rachmaninoff and La Cambiale del Matrimonio by Gioachino Rossini. George Frideric Handel's opera Alcina features in the second two evenings.

La Cambiale di Matrimonio, or The Marriage Contract, is an operatic farsa comica which Rossini composed in a few days when he was 18 years old. It was his first professional opera and is an important part of the modern concert repertoire.

Aleko, on the other hand, is the first of three completed operas by Rachmaninoff and is an adaptation of the poem The Gypsies by Alexander Pushkin. The opera was written in 1892 as a graduation work at the Moscow Conservatory and it won the highest prizes from the conservatory judges that year.

Alcina is an opera seria by Handel where the plot was taken from Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, an epic poem set in the time of Charlemagne's wars against Islam. The opera contains several musical sequences and was composed for Handel's first season at the Covent Garden Theatre, London. It premiered on April 16, 1735 but fell into obscurity until after a revival in Brunswick in 1738 and again in Leipzig in 1928.