Performer: Kathryn Harries

Annilese Miskimmon sets Janáček's powerful tale in rural Ireland, bringing this blistering drama of a close-knit rural community closer to home.

There’s usually plenty of hype surrounding a newly written opera performed at Covent Garden, but the carefully placed stories about Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune are on the improbable end of the scale, featuring a flying kebab shop and a team of breakdancers. So I arrived at Miss Fortune without any real idea of what I was going to get.

Hijacking, murder and terror on the high seas: you might expect that The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams's 1991 opera about the Palestinian hijacking of the cruise liner Achille Lauro has all the makings of a pot-boiling thriller. But you would be wrong: Adams and his librettist Alice Goodman have other fish to fry.