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Despite an early misadventure, Teatro dell'Opera di Roma launches Maurizio Scaparro's staging of Rossini's comic opera with panache. 

Cecilia Ligorio directs the first new production of Mozart's early opera at the Opera di Roma since 1988. 

An unusual double bill pairing of Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero opens at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma. 

Illusion – theatrical illusion – is the theme of Pierre Audi's staging of Alcina, Handel’s beloved opera which finally makes its debut in Rome. 

Valentina Carrasco's contemporary staging, with impressive sets and singing, makes for a remarkable show at the Teatro dell'Opera. 

A historical staging with well sung arias doesn't really bring Puccini's opera alive as Rome marks its 125th anniversary. 

La Lira di Orfeo and Raffaele Pe bring Handel's opera in a concert performance to the Parco della Musica. 

Fabio Ceresa applies his "Baroque divertissement" style to Haydn's oratorio The Creation, staged at the Festival della Valle d'Itria.

Robert Carsen's minimalist modern reading of Gluck's masterpiece is a pure distillation of opera (and life) and the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma.

Michael Barker-Caven sets Aida in a 21st-century war zone in the Middle-East, allowing the audience to focus on the human drama.

Mercadante's score proves to be something of a missing link between bel canto and early Verdi. 

Dinner at Eight, William Bolcom and librettist Mark Campbell's 2017 opera, had its European première at Wexford Festival Opera on Saturday under conductor David Agler. The opera is based on the 1932 play by George S Kaufman and Edna Ferber, in turn adapted into a movie by George Cukor (1933).

Joshua Bloom and Paula Murrihy excel in Irish National Opera's staging of Bartók's opera, although director Enda Walsh takes too many liberties with the libretto. 

Tom Creed's take on Offenbach's opéra fantastique works best in the Olympia act in this new production in Dublin. 

Rachel Kelly shines in a mixed production at Lismore Castle. 

The biggest stigma associated with opera in Ireland is not that it is an elitist art form, but that it is not “Irish”, and that it doesn’t belong to Irish culture, more of a recent import, like pasta, or avocado.

Two contraltos in one room is a high concentration of contraltos; except that one of them appeared in the role of conductor.

Even in a festival like Wexford’s, you cannot resist the attraction of a beloved opera that you know by heart.

Franco Alfano’s name is inextricably linked to that of Puccini, as he’s mostly remembered for completing the unfinished score of Turandot, and has overshadowed his own operas. 

The performance of Margherita d’Anjou seen at the Festival della Valle d’Itria in Martina Franca was the first staged in modern times.

Ovid’s Metamorphosis (on which the episode of Acis and Galatea is based) set in an Irish pub? Cowboys in place of shepherds and a bartender instead of a nymph?

Roddy Doyle's new translation is ingenious more often than incongruous; John Molloy's Leporello steals the show in the Opera Theatre's Don Giovanni.