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Calixto Bieito takes on Prokofiev's Tolstoy epic – and wins in the opera's Hungarian premiere. 

The Hungarian State Opera's first New York tour featured an opera of forbidden love set in the Biblical Times by Karl Goldmark, and was a rare treat for the New York audience.

Stephen Gould is less than convincing in the lead role of Tannhäuser, but excellent ensemble work under Ádám Fischer's inspired direction offers compensations.

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.

The score of Goldmark's opera is filled with lovely orchestral surprises, in addition to stunning arias, but is often filled with an abundance of slow tempos.

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.

Quality singing impresses in Puccini's opera at the Hungarian State Opera, despite a dusty staging.

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. 

Underwhelming performances, all too tempestuous conducting and an aesthetically pleasing but puzzling production fail to thrill.