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This abridged version of Massenet's Cendrillon was clearly chosen for a wide Sydney audience, succeeding as a popular offering in the Australian summer holiday season. 

Comedy fails to spark in Laurent Pelly's new production of Falstaff at the Teatro Real. 

Laurent Pelly’s staging provided some of the most memorable moments in this performance of Cendrillon. 

Laurent Pelly exploits the satirical side of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel at La Monnaie in a darkly humorous but colourfully performed production.

After an absence of nearly a quarter-century, Humperdinck's evergreen returns to Seattle Opera in a winningly staged, musically sensitive production that looks beneath the fairy-tale surface.

Berlioz's Béatrice et Bénédict is light and fluffy, making it perfect summer festival fare. Sadly, like a soggy soufflé, Pelly's one-trick staging soon falls flat.

Sultry Spanish rhythms and bawdy humour are counterbalanced by Gallic charm in the return to Glyndebourne of Laurent Pelly’s productions of L’Heure espagnole and L’Enfant et les sortilèges. Danielle de Niese joined a largely Francophone cast to ensure this joyous revival fizzed.

I once heard a lecture by Gérard Mortier, then head of the Paris Opera, contrasting the twin operatic traditions starting from Monteverdi's serious and affecting dramma per musica and the lavish court entertainments of Lully. A couple of centuries on, there's no need to ask the side of the fence on which Massenet's Cendrillon falls.