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Rodula Gaitanou sets Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's comedy in the Cinecittà film studios of the 1950s. 

John Savournin directs Opera Holland Park's end-of-term G&S romp.

Despite the excellent playing of the Britten Sinfonia, Anna Morrissey’s flawed production disappoints. 

As the Governess Alison Rose was the ideal suffering soprano, her eyes an imbroglio of psychological disturbances.

Directing Entführung at the grand old age of 85, John Copley gives us plenty of fun in the Pasha's palace. 

Tchaikovsky's High Gothic opera about gambling obsessions is worth seeing for a first class staging, albeit with a mixed musical performance.

Opera North's captivating production of Janáček’s Jenůfa directed by Tom Cairns at the Grand Theatre Leeds

An updated Orfeo and Eurydice at Buxton sees Orpheus as an ageing rocker, too distracted by adoring groupies to notice Eurydice. However, one piece of casting was an unsolvable conundrum. 

The charm-ometer was cranked firmly to ‘high’ yesterday evening for the opening opera of this year’s Buxton Festival with a performance of The Jacobin, an opera close to Dvořák’s heart. 

Mozart’s original The Magic Flute is bizarre enough. The story of a prince and a bird-catcher’s journey to save a princess they’ve never met from a sinister quasi-Freemason who turns out to be alright, it is sufficiently packed full of great songs and good humour to have become an enduring repertory favourite – but that doesn’t mean it makes any sense. It doesn’t, really. It is a daft opera.

If you think that Hansel and Gretel is a gentle, happy piece of Christmas cheer, the first act of Lewis Reynolds's pub production for Open Door Opera might give you pause for thought. The children may be naughty, but they're genuinely starving, and the mother may be overbearingly harsh, but she is genuinely at her wits' end.

No wonder the 1744 audience was shocked by this “oratorio” which, far from drawing on Biblical themes, displays before us the sexual misdemeanor of the immortal Jove, with a mortal, Semele.