Master plan or coincidence? Madrid’s majestic Teatro Real enriches its season with back-to-back concert performances of two operas that both happen to have premiered in London. On February 10 and 14, we turn to I Masnadieri (1847), Verdi’s first foreign commission, adapted from the barely 20-year-old Friedrich Schiller’s monstrously influential blood-and-thunder melodrama Die Räuber. Piero Pretti sings Carlo, the chivalrous nobleman who turns bandit when his dastardly kid brother Francesco (Mattia Oliveri) bad-mouths him to their credulous dad Count Massimiliano (Alexander Vinogradov)—shades of the diabolical Gloucester subplot in King Lear. The glittering Lisette Oropesa appears as Carlo’s beloved Amalia, on whom Francesco has less honorable designs. Fun fact: The part was written for Jenny Lind, the superstar billed as the Swedish nightingale. Promoted in the U.S. by P. T. Barnum, Lind also toured on her own, notching appearances in such unlikely locations as Mammoth Cave, Kentucky (now part of the National Parks Service as well as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and International Biosphere Region). Francesco Lanzilotta conducts. Next comes Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1724). Once a unicorn, now a war horse, this Baroque jewel showcases the break-dancing YouTube countertenor sensation Jakub Józef Orliński as the Roman conqueror and the scintillating soprano Sabine Devieilhe as Cleopatra, who conquers him in turn. Francesco Corti conducts the period band Il Pomo d’Oro. —Matthew Gurewitsch