Performer: Layla Claire

What does opera in the 21st century look and sound like? Streets removed from anything Mozart, Verdi or Wagner would have recognised. But Salvatore Sciarrino is his own man.

Lawrence Cummings conducts Zurich’s Orchestra La Scintilla in Handel’s oratorio-cum-opera, Belshazzar. The music was celestial; the staging was a bombastic mix of excess and vaudeville.

Christian Gerhaher’s experience in a role he knows well rescued an evening of mitigated pleasures.