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New Zealand Opera's new production impresses with its stunning set design and art direction, and its restrained emotional tone. 

Led by guest conductor David Danzmayr, the Seattle Symphony's performance of Beethoven's Ninth resumes an interrupted tradition, with a Buddhist prayer set to music by Lili Boulanger as the touching preface.

Great vocal performances from Amina Edris and Gerald Finley grace John Adams' new opera, which opens San Francisco Opera’s centennial season.

Kathleen Belcher's production is well sung and vividly characterized – but a focus on the comedy comes at the expense of pathos

Programming Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music is quite a daring move in a country with no real tradition in musical. This production by Nederlands Reisopera shows that fortune favours the bold.

Thomas Adès’ Powder Her Face has plenty of sex written in, and West Edge Opera's production adds even more. But it's the music and drama that sell.

Great opera at the Los Angeles Philharmonic as Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande as part of the City of Light, a retrospective that examines works seen in Paris during the first half of the 20th century. 

A memorable production of Vivaldi's pasticcio opera Bajazet from Pinchgut Opera in Sydney. 

Despite a relatively easy-to-follow storyline, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro is an opera that is hard to pull off entirely successfully. Musically, it requires enormous vigour from both cast and orchestra; dramatically, this opera buffa demands strong acting skills in order to eke out its moments of farce.

For the past ten years, Pinchgut Opera has established a reputation for excellence through mounting one opera production annually in Sydney (the name derives from an island in Sydney’s harbour, established as a prison from the beginnings of settlement). Their focus has hitherto been on lesser-known Baroque works, with a few later 18th-century outliers.