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This concert, with a running time of about two hours, was a lovely dip in the Rhine without the usual four-to-five hour Wagnerian full immersion.

The acting was patchy and the singing ranged from serviceable to laudable in this dazzling new production at the Budapest Spring Festival.

With Gergely Kesselyák on double duty as conductor and director, this revival proves musically outstanding but theatrically less than satisfying.

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.

In Brno, Janáček's home, at the theatre and festival that bear his name, Jenůfa receives a performance with all the musical and dramatic intensity you might wish for.

Miklós Szinetár's production for Hungarian State Opera is easy on the eye, but perhaps a little too beautiful for its subject matter.

In a reconstruction of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s production for the world première of Reimann’s soul-pummelling Lear, the staging stands the test of time, but the cast and orchestra leave the biggest impression.

Despite some staging problems, a Czech rarity gives the National Theater's new opera season a rousing start, with a vibrant score beautifully realized by conductor John Fiore.