Performer: Louis Otey

Bard SummerScape made musical history by presenting the first full staging of British composer Ethel Smyth’s opera The Wreckers. Born in 1858 and dying in 1944, Smyth was celebrated in her day (John Singer Sargent painted her portrait in 1901) not only for her compositions, but for being an openly bisexual member of the suffrage movement.

Tony Pappano’s recipe for a concert programme: take a 20th century Italian one act opera, follow it with a romantic symphony chopped in half, then throw in a related German aria; play without a break. It may sound like a train wreck in the making, but the result was a triumph.

Read our review of Guy Joosten's production of Gounod­'s Roméo et Juliette in its 2007 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.