Elliott Erwitt has spent his entire adult life taking photographs, of presidents, popes and movie stars, as well as regular people and their pets. His work is iconic in world culture while his life is largely unknown.

Among Seville’s cigar makers, Carmen is the most attractive woman around. Arrested for the assault of a friend, she enthralls the brigadier Don José who lets her escape. For her, José abandons his childhood sweetheart, he gives up his rank, deserts the army… and to what ends will passion drive him when he loses Carmen's love to the glamorous bullfighter Escamillo? We can only imagine the reactions of the first Parisian audiences at the Opéra Comique, who are said to have been shocked to see the incarnation of such an independent heroine. But what would those audiences in 1875 have actually seen on stage? With the support of Palazzetto Bru Zane (Centre de Musique Romantique Française), Opéra de Rouen Normandie have (re)created Bizet’s Carmen with the original costumes, sets and staging of the 1875 premiere.

Between Russia and the USA, an enchanting concert in summery tones, led by young Finnish conductor Tarmo Peltokoski and South African soprano Golda Schultz. On the program: works by Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky and Samuel Barber, as well as George Gershwin's classic "Summertime".

Slovenian conductor Martina Batič and the Radio France Choir offers an eclectic programme combining Wagner, Debussy, Fauré and Poulenc. The choir is accompanied by eight cellists from the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio de France.

Boris Vian was a man of many interests and talents. He played the trumpet, wrote criticism, essays, novels, poems and plays, did some painting and sculpting. Philippe Kohly chooses to recount Boris Vian’s life through his love for jazz, his quest for freedom, his taste for celebration.

Accompanied by a child, the mathematician Galileo observes the firmament with a telescope. Ten years ago, the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned in Rome for having supported the idea of an infinite and centerless universe, based on the work of Copernicus. By dint of observations and calculations, Galileo seeks proofs for his hypothesis of a cosmic system where the Earth is "an ordinary celestial body, one among thousands". From Padua to Venice, the mathematician shakes certainties by confronting the power of a Church which wishes to maintain its absolute power in the "crystal spheres" where Ptolemy has hitherto locked up the world.

Go inside the building that has been the source of some of the greatest moments in music, ballet and opera.

In the fall of 2010, Bozon and co-conspirator Pascale Bodet commandeered the first floor of Paris’s famed Centre Pompidou for 10 days of screenings, lectures and performances that amounted to a counter-canonical history of French cinema. During the ensuing merriment (entitled Beaubourg, la dernière Major !) audience members were invited to observe the daily making of this film, directed by Bozon and written by Axelle Ropert, about an inexperienced young journalist (Laure Marsac) sent to the Pompidou to interview a maverick artistic impresario (Thomas Chabrol). The result is an unexpected love story that is also a record of this landmark exhibition, featuring cameos by Raul Ruiz, Paul Vecchiali, Luc Moullet and more !

A musical and visual account of the life and exceptional and immortal work of the French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937).

A young woman, Antonia, returns to her island of birth, Corsica, after one of her relatives has disappeared at sea. She is torn back and forth between her old love Ettore and the dumb Alexander. The quest for Antonia's place in the masculine environment of armed nationalism is an excuse for all kinds of peregrinations in the spectacular landscape of Cap Corse - a landscape that itself becomes a leading character.

A meditation on the passing of all things and an affirmation of faith in creative power, Symphony No. 2 in C minor, "Resurrection," remains undoubtedly the most popular of Gustav Mahler's symphonies. The iconoclastic Romeo Castellucci (whose version of Mozart's Requiem in Aix-en-Provence in 2019 caused quite a stir) joins forces with Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen for a radical reinterpretation of this existential fresco.

In February 1972, the American president Richard Nixon went to China to meet Mao Zedong. In the context of the war in Vietnam and the cold war, this encounter marked a turning point in Chinese‑American relations. John Adams, a major musical figure of the last forty years, made this event of contemporary history the subject of his first opera. Nixon in China tackles the political thaw instigated by ping-pong diplomacy, begun by the invitation of the American table tennis players by their Chinese counterparts, one year before the presidential visit. A mesmerising work in which the pulsations and repetitions typical of minimalism are combined with melodic lines of great lyricism. For its entry into the Paris Opera repertoire, this work has been entrusted to the director Valentina Carrasco, who underlines the importance and the mediating power of Chinese national sport in history.

For their final concert on Les Chemins de Bach, Raphaël Pichon and the Pygmalion ensemble perform Bach's short masses and motets in Arnstadt's Bachkirche.

Opera in three acts by Christoph Willibald Gluck, Hector Berlioz's version (1859)