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A gripping, if occasionally puzzling, evening from Doug Varone. 

Though the photographic accompaniment was earthbound, Messiaen and the LAPO led us to the stars. 

Tree of Codes opens at the Park Avenue Armory in New York - a collaboration between Wayne McGregor, Olafur Eliasson and Jamie xx.

The world premiere of Naughty Boy's new track Runnin', featuring the superb Arrow Benjamin, made a high point in an otherwise gawky and under-rehearsed Prom programme from the BBC Asian Network. 

Choreographer Wayne McGregor, music producer Jamie XX and artist Olafur Eliasson fill in Foer's gaps, in a performance of Tree of Codes that brings Random dance and Paris Opera corps and principal dancers together on stage, at the Manchester International Festival.

Doug Fitch masterminds a splendidly inventive multimedia rendering of Petrushka, ably supported by Alan Gilbert and the NY Phil.

A superb fusion of dance and circus, full of endless surprises and astonishing feats that leave the audience breathless for the full 80 minutes of uninterrupted thrills.

A mind-bending physical theatre piece performed at the Sydney Opera House which challenges assumptions of gravity, as clever acrobatics confuse the notion of which way is up.

A note in the programme honestly records the trepidation Opéra de Baugé felt in taking on Verdi’s Aida, a tougher prospect than the other operas with which it’s in rep, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus.

If Debussy intended Pelléas et Mélisande as a deliberate anti-Tristan, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore perhaps stumbled into the role. Donizetti was of course not responding to Wagner’s opera (which would not be written for another three decades) but to the legend Wagner would also draw on, with results that were rather more... German, shall we say, than the sunlit uplands of L’elisir.

It’s a curious thing that when operatic characters are drinking at a party, they invariably sing about how nice it is to be drinking at a party – never sports results, or the weather, or how all them bleedin’ ’ungarians are coming over to Austria and taking all our jobs...

Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann is a fine example of how the ridiculous can indeed be sublime. Three E.T.A. Hoffmann stories about otherworldly love affairs with defective femmes fatales, one of whom turns out to be a mechanical doll, connected only by the author’s gullible alter-ego as protagonist, scale the heights of the phantasmagorical.

For the first time in twenty-five years, the Opera Company of Philadelphia has mounted a production of Puccini’s first great opera, Manon Lescaut. The result was an inspired testament to thoughtful direction by Michael Cavanagh, gorgeous sets and costumes by John Pascoe, and several winning performances.

Imagine that Britney Spears is in the final throes of life. She stages one last concert to bid farewell to her fans, but is too mentally unstable to make it work. Her former lover Justin Timberlake appears onstage and attempts to win back her affections. Everything happens in slow motion, perhaps because Britney is undergoing a sort of psychotic breakdown.

How much wine can a cast pretend to drink over the course of one production? If such a record has been set Adam Spreadbury-Maher, Ben Cooper and Robin Norton-Hale’s Don Giovanni presents a good challenge. For much of this production characters, music and set seemed drunk on wine and melodrama, high on the drug of their own confident style – but all were ultimately weakened by their instability.