As a result, Bregenz's shoreline, the Seepromenade, is in permanent festival mode.What's onAs in 2003, Bregenz hasBernstein's West Side Story in an updated version which combines punk rock costuming with a set that looks suspiciously like the twisted metal ruins of the twin towers (festival organisers deny any deliberate parallels). To accommodate a mixed-language audience, the show will be sung in English, with German dialogue. Other highlights of this year's festival will include an indoor production of Kurt Weill's The Protagonist.Ticket bookingsCall 00 43 5574 4076 or visit 9 Torre del Lago, ItalyWhen: 23 July-21 AugustWhy goPuccini lived on this lake until some Tuscan businessmen built a peat factory next door and the smell drove him away. The audience sits on the shore while a gigantic, and usually very strange, set is moored to an artificial island in the lake. Visually it is are stunning, but because of the distances involved, sound from the hidden orchestra has to be blasted out through speakers. Only one production at a time can take place on this bizarre set and, because it takes so long to build, each runs for two years. A new children's opera, Canine Kalevala, will be given at Savonlinna Hall, the festival's mainland home.Ticket bookingsCall 00 358 15 476 750 or visit Bregenz, AustriaWhen: 21 July-22 AugustWhy goBregenz is a hugely popular destination with cultural tour groups worldwide, and famous for its open-air productions.

Performances are given in the covered courtyard of the castle, which hasn't been much modified since its construction in 1475. This make for a great Macbeth, but it is odd to see Aida or La boh? staged in what looks like Dunsinane.What's on New production of Tales of Hoffmann, plus Cavalleria Rusticana, The Flying Dutchman and Turandot, with which Savonlinna scored a big hit in China last year. There'll also be an American premiere of Richard Rodney Bennett's The Mines of Sulphur and a new production of Puccini's only American opera, La fanciulla del West.Ticket bookingsCall 00 1 607 547 2255 or visit 7 Savonlinna, FinlandWhen: 9 July-7 AugustWhy goHome of one of the few festivals held in the middle of a lake - rather than on its shores, Savonlinna Castle makes a great set for Macbeth, which it has frequently staged The opera festival began in 1912, and Verdi is a speciality. Glimmerglass now has its own 900-seater, the Alice Busch, and a formidable reputation for commissioning new works including a triptych of new operas premiered in 1999 - Midnight Angel, A Question of Taste, and a trilogy, Central Park (Food of Love, Stawberry Fields and Festival of Regrets). Glimmerglass takes its name from a fictitious lake in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales and is set in the stunning scenery of the Catskill mountains.

An integral part of the festival is the sliding back of the auditorium walls during opera intervals so that patrons can enjoy the spectacular views.What's onThe festival will have an English feel to it this year, with Gilbert and Sullivan's satire on aesthetics, Patience, and Handel's Imeneo. The choice of opera is not imaginative - Verdi's Rigoletto and Aida, Puccini's La boh?, Tosca and a centenary year production of Madama Butterfly - but the open-air setting of this 12,000-seater theatre is unbeatable.Ticket bookingsCall 00 90 312 311 2430 or email aspendosfestival kultur.gov.tr6 Glimmerglass, USAWhen: 1 July-24 AugustWhy goIt's amazing to think that one of the premiere East Coast arts festivals started out less than 30 years ago with a high-school production of La boh?. This one has always worked to a specific brief: to encourage co-operation between the arts. This makes splendid use of an old Roman theatre, built AD162 and preserved by the Seljuks, who were still in there, drawing on the walls, 1,200 years later.What's onAspendos acts as a forum for all Turkey's opera and ballet companies to show off their wares.

Aegean Izmir stages open-air performances in the old Greek theatre and library of Ephesus, while at Aspendos, on the Mediterranean, an annual opera festival is now in its 10th year. As if that's not odd enough, the noises coming from the pit will be the result of Drottningholm's resident baroque orchestra using Chinese instruments.Ticket bookingsCall 00 46 8 660 82 25 or visit Amsterdam, The NetherlandsWhen: 4-27 JuneWhy goThe Holland Festival was another of those worthy events that began immediately after the Second World War. Second up is Cecilia and The Monkey King, a new opera from the Swedish composer Reine J?on, which is set in Canton and features Italian-speaking Swedish aristocrats and English-speaking Swedish peasants. The first, Miklos Maros's Castrati, features not just two of the 18th-century's best known castrati on its cast list (Farinelli and Marchesi), but King Gustavus III himself. Drottningholm is a perfectly preserved baroque theatre, built for the Swedish royal family and then forgotten for more than a century.What's onMost years, Drottningholm presents baroque operas as they would have been seen during the reign of Gustavus III (the assassinated Swedish king whom Verdi commemorates in A Masked Ball), but this year they're embarking on something radically different, with two new operas. Ice Globe presents Saami-language Shakespeare every winter inside a replica of The Globe that has been carved out of ice, while at Dalhalla, opera is given in a hole in the ground. Every year, Spoleto USA performs opera in the intimate Dock Street Theatre and celebrates the conclusion of festivities with a picnic concert in the grounds of Middleton Place, Charleston's oldest plantation.What's onSpoleto USA will open this year with Richard Strauss's audience-challenging Ariadne auf Naxos, which it then follows up with something decidedly kinder to the human ear, Bellini's setting of the Romeo and Juliet story, I Capuleti ei Montecchi.Ticket bookingsCall 00 1 843 579 3100 or visit 3 Drottningholm, SwedenWhen: 3 June-24 JulyWhy goSweden has some of the strangest festivals in the world.