We’re guessing that His Serene Highness Prince Albert II, Sovereign Prince of Monaco, favors working artists for the role of directors of his Opéra de Monte-Carlo. Take Cecilia Bartoli, who holds the position now and graces his theater regularly. Her predecessor was the Monegasque stage director and high-ranking politico Jean-Louis Gringa, who returns this month to mount the fever dream that is Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in tandem with the company’s music director Kazuki Yamada. Gringa and Yamada have collaborated often, but there’s new blood in the mix as well. The three doomed principals in the action are all making house debuts. As the evasive Mélisande, who lies or changes the subject virtually whenever she utters a word, Léa Desandre is also giving her role debut. As the half-brothers whose lives she destroys (as they do hers), Monte-Carlo welcomes the roles’ most celebrated contemporary avatars: Huw Montague Rendall as the otherworldly melancholiac Pelléas and Gerald Finley as the glowering, widowed Golaud. —Matthew Gurewitsch