Giuseppe Verdi’s early work Nabucco has often been interpreted as an epic call (“Va pensiero”) to the national liberation struggle that would eventually lead to Italian unity. However, the opera emphasises, perhaps unwittingly, a particularity of rabbinic thought, the idea of the "withdrawal" of the divine as a presence of absence.

Brazilian director, filmmaker and author Christiane Jatahy, who was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2022, will organise the Jewish people’s resistance in Babylon by speaking, as she is wont to do in her readings of the classics, the words of those who are still resisting today at the four corners of the world, from the Middle East to the Amazon.

Maestro Antonino Fogliani will lead the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, through the piece’s differences and concordances, along with a cast of extraordinary bel canto singers, including Riccardo Zanellato, Nicola Alaimo and Saioa Hernandez.