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At Staatsoper Hamburg, Unsuk Chin’s new opera The Dark Side of the Moon immerses audiences in an hypnotic, introspective journey, where dreams, science and psyche collide in a rigorously crafted, thought-provoking spectacle.

No half measures in a triple-decker Hamburg staging of Saint François d'Assise at the Elbphilharmonie. 

Opening the new opera season, Kent Nagano powerfully directs Mussorgsky's great psychodrama about a famous tsar, marred only by Frank Castorf's visually confusing and symbolically overweighted production. 

“Jealous lover kills local slut” might be the tabloid headline, but Bizet's Carmen is much more than that, especially in this visually stunning new production in Hamburg, directed by Herbert Fritsch.

Kent Nagano brings Mahler's former Hamburg orchestra out of the opera house and into the concert hall for the composer's symphonic hymn to life.

Kent Nagano and the forces of Staatsoper Hamburg launch their new season with a production of Shostakovich's very first opera in which the ears are beguiled but the eyes are not.

From stylised 16th-century dress to a 1970s sitcom ballet, Konwitschny's Staatsoper staging is full of brilliantly inventive touches, splendidly realised in this excellently sung revival. 

Hamburg's revival of a 2015 production is a musical success, but the director's concepts are sometimes too dense to tell a straightforward story.

Hamburg State Opera launches its new season with a visually overpowering but musically satisfying Così fan tutte.

Johannes Laiacker’s inspired set designs were a perfect example of how a modern setting can avoid being gratuitously iconoclastic.

At least the colour-coded characters in Andreas Homoki’s farcical production made it easy to know which team to barrack for.

Mozart's very notes become servant to the cause in an ingenious staging of Le nozze di Figaro by one of today's most esteemed directors.

A musically strong revival of an austere production still leaves one feeling short-changed.