Carmina Burana will be staged by the Barcelona-based La Fura dels Baus under its director Carlus Padrissa. The urban theatre group is famous for a number of spectacles, including opera classics by Wagner, Berlioz and Puccini.

Its productions combine theatre, music, innovative stage design, visual effects, videos, film, acrobatics and dance, and use fireworks, pools, lasers and vertical nets, on which actors climb.

Among the other highlights of the festival, its director Darko Brlek has listed concerts by Slovenian singer-songwriter Tomaž Domicelj and the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra.

Moreover, he highlighted Emerich Kalman's The Csardas Princess in a co-production of the Ljubljana Festival, the SNG Opera and Ballet Ljubljana and the Komedija Zagreb theatre, and Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet staged by the Polish National Ballet.

Ljubljana will once again host Latvian mezzo-soprano Elina Garanča, the National Ballet of China will perform Hamlet, the Beijing Opera will present Puccini's Madama Butterfly, and the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra from St Petersburg with conductor Valery Gergiev will perform Wagner's Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods.

The other highlights include concerts by British violinist Nigel Kennedy and West End and Broadway musical soloists, and the Slovenian premiere of Serbian composer Ana Sokolović's opera Svatba (Wedding) in a co-production of the Ljubljana Festival and the Festival D'Aix-En-Provence.

Events leading to the festival will meanwhile be the Summer Night concert on 21 June, dedicated to the 80th birthday of Slovenian jazz composer and conductor Jože Privšek (1937-1998), and the 7 June premiere of musical Vesna, based on one of the first Slovenian feature films from 1953.

As an early introduction to the festival, Ljubljana will host on 9 February London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Pinchas Zukerman, a world-acclaimed Israeli violinist and conductor.