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All praise should be heaped on Rosie Middleton for her brave evocation and the vocal prowess of her performance in Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King. 

Joining OHP's 2019 production of Wolf-Ferrari's charming domestic comedy, a blazing new production of Pagliacci delivers everything that one could want from Leoncavallo's infamous opera. 

Michael Chance takes the audience around The Grange in a thoughtful show combining opera excerpts, dance, acrobats, vocal and instrumental music.

English Touring Opera open their autumn season with the first of two Singspiels. 

Wolf-Ferrari's Il segreto di Susanna provides an airy bon-bouche to Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, brilliantly sung by Natalya Romaniw and David Butt Philip and conducted to fairy-tale perfection by Sian Edwards

Rossini's Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra is a hard work to love and English Touring Opera's new production which launched at the Hackney Empire Theatre struggled to make a case for regular outings.

ETO's extracts from Rossini's serious operas at the Hackney Empire lacked spark and dynamism, but saw a fine showing from Elena Xanthoudakis and Catherine Carby.

C’est que la Lucia de Bernadette Grimmett n’est pas révisionniste, et ne confond pas regard et distanciation : à rebours des malentendus transformant la meurtrière en vengeresse, et la victime en femme forte, Lucia n’apparaît ici qu’en elle-même. 

Donizetti's back catalogue proves just as rich as his well-loved works, with this blisteringly good foray into an extraordinary opera whose UK premiere is 179 undeserved years late. 

If Debussy intended Pelléas et Mélisande as a deliberate anti-Tristan, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore perhaps stumbled into the role. Donizetti was of course not responding to Wagner’s opera (which would not be written for another three decades) but to the legend Wagner would also draw on, with results that were rather more... German, shall we say, than the sunlit uplands of L’elisir.