A great opera house, set in attractive surrounding...

A great opera house, set in attractive surroundings. Festival is expensive but fun. Productions vary from the familiar and popular repertoire - Mozart and the usual Italian stuff to the more modern and avant-garde, which is always disappointing for the posers and corporate hospitality brigade, hoping for something more accessible. Anyway, it's nice to don the uniform, adopt a learned stance and brush shoulders with the regulars, and bewildered foreigners trying to find their place in the Festival pecking order.