Find articles | Katherine Syer

Time is suspended in Huang Ruo and Basil Twist's meditative, 80-minute stagework, now receiving its West Coast premiere. 

A digital version of Toshio Hosokawa's disturbing opera uses lip-synched video to create remoteness between what we see and what we hear.

A highly satisfying level of polish in La Monnaie's stream in which one recognizes a precisely executed live performance at its core – one that would be thrilling to experience in person. 

Forced to shift to online for the third episode of its Ring cycle, Göteborg Opera delivers absorbing new production by Stephen Langridge.

 An unusual double bill of operas by Joby Talbot and Sergei Rachmaninov under conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya in Chicago.  

A revival of Richard Jones’ production of Handel’s emotionally probing opera. 

There’s no doubt that Mélisande endeavours to escape past troubles when she first appears in Barrie Kosky’s production of Debussy’s opera, yet Nadja Mchantaf is no reticent, wispy maiden. Every vocal and physical gesture – always precise and penetrating – displays an atypically forthright quest for vitality, something that Arkel’s chauvinistic world does not readily offer.

Franz Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten (The Branded One) is an unsettling work given the storyline’s background of abduction and clandestine sexual abuse. Calixto Bieito, as expected, eschews ambiguity regarding what goes on behind the scenes, and casts even the titular cripple Alviano Salvago in a damning light.

Fellow Travelers is shot through with darkness, making for a chilling performance by Lyric Opera of Chicago. 

Chicago's new Faust is a quest for youth but also a reflection on insipiration, fabrication and manipulation. 

Kevin Puts effectively shapes the time-traveling structure with distinctive sound worlds as thirty dramatic vignettes unfold across a little more than an hour and a half.

Dead Man Walking is currently the most frequently performed contemporary American opera. Joel Ivany's staging, first mounted in Vancouver, opened recently at Minnesota Opera just days after the opera's Spanish première in Madrid. 

David Pountney's new production of Die Walküre for the Lyric Opera of Chicago incisively charts the tectonic shift of control over the future from Wotan to Brünnhilde.

Dance takes center stage in Lyric Opera of Chicago's bold season-opening co-production of Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice.

A festive air was palpable – the house was technically sold out – as the first of a set of three Ring cycles launched at the Wiener Staatsoper. 

Sir David McVicar's production of Tristan und Isolde premiered at the Wiener Staatsoper in 2013, and was then recognized as a friendly platform for singers. Here it is freshly revived with a new cast.

Kay Link's new production of Handel's pasticcio Oreste is surprisingly strong theatrically, often musically too. 

This double cast, nine-day revival of Vadim Milkov's staging of Pique Dame offers a relatively straight reading of Tchaikovsky's opera about the obsessive Pushkin-based character Herman. Embracing the opera's choral and dance passages, spectacle and pageantry are paramount; the drama's surreal and more nuanced dimensions could have been better profiled.

At the Theater an der Wien, director Mariame Clément and novelist Lucy Wadham have crafted innovative material that brings the old-fashioned lyrics to life in a coherent and contemporary dramatic setting.

From page to stage, the creation of a new opera often takes years. This is true of Alma Deutscher's first full-length opera Cinderella, so the fact that she has completed this ambitious project at the age of eleven is all the more remarkable.

This revival of Christof Loy's 2014 production of Alcina launched the New Year at Oper Zürich in magnificent fashion.

A compelling staging of Gluck's 1779 opera in Paris. 

Movable walls, some adorned with Baroque frescoes, partition the stage in ways that remind the viewer of the easy proximity of the masters and servants' quarters in Almaviva's estate.

Péter Eötvös conceived his opera Senza Sangue (Without Blood) as a complement to Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle. Dmitri Tcherniakov has now staged and designed Senza Sangue together with Bluebeard's Castle for Staatsoper Hamburg.

Opening the weekend that marked the 60th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution, The Mine (A Bánya), the first of Rautavaara's nine operas, dramatizes events from those turbulent times. 

Baroque purists might prefer a more surefire line-up of brilliantly executed arias, but the theatrical framework of Adrian Noble's Alcina production offers a great deal.

Peter Konwistchny scores audience success with his new production of Boris Godunov, a theatrically inventive critical take on manipulation and the disfiguring effects of power.

Music-making in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt/Terezín continues to fascinate, baffle and inspire us.

Britten's The Turn of the Screw finally makes its debut at La Scala in Kasper Holten's eerie staging.