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Vladimir Jurowski's six-year Ring with the LPO closes as the cycle began: a gleaming, golden ring with a black hole at its core. 

At the Royal Albert Hall, the Philharmonia Chorus make an infernal set of demons, encouraged by that impish Lord of misrule, Vasily Petrenko. 

Dutch National Opera revives Pierre Audi's acclaimed Die Walküre for the very last time.

We start with a triumphant Royal Opera debut from Stuart Skelton, we close with Nina Stemme at her finest; a thrilling orchestral performance links the two. A memorable Walküre.

After all the speculation, Jonas Kaufmann made his role debut as Otello at The Royal Opera – an impressive, if not unqualified, success. 

The unclear ideas and the excessive blackness in Thalheimer’s concept failed to convince, but Stoyanov and Joel’s presentation of Verdi’s score made up for those problems.

Dutch National Opera have given themselves and their patrons a smashing 50th birthday present – a production of Der Rosenkavalier that is a winner on all fronts.

If “all the world’s a jest”, as Sir John Falstaff claims at the end of Verdi’s final operatic masterpiece, then we need players – and directors – with a sense of frivolity. Robert Carsen truly delivers. 

Monumental in scale and scope, Götterdämmerung is a work to which it is hard to be indifferent. For many, the idea of an evening of fantasy opera lasting nearly seven hours is unimaginable, so uncongenial is the subject material and so great the attention span demanded.

The Tenth Anniversary of the Royal Opera House’s Jette Parker Young Artists Scheme is a landmark of no small size. This summer performance brought back some of the best singers it has produced for a semi-staged rendition of Rossini’s one-act 1825 opera Il Viaggio a Reims. It was a celebratory display of virtuoso held together with a generous dose of self-indulgence.

In the end, the big man gets the last laugh. Come to think of it, he also gets the first laugh, but for different reasons: you sense that Verdi steadily grew to love Falstaff in the course of writing the opera, as he turns from a coarse buffoon into a maligned old man and, eventually, into the spirit of laughter itself.

It has become customary to give recent productions of Hänsel and Gretel a modern and often murkier twist, perhaps mirroring the current surge in popularity of darker stories, and the appetite for Nordic noir in particular.

A split-level stage featuring an ornate stairwell and scaffolding was the setting for this the tenth Jette Parker Young Artists’ Summer Performance. Entitled ‘Veneziana’, the specially compiled programme embodied the visions of Venice dreamt by Rossini, Donizetti, Britten and Offenbach in six sets of Opera Scenes.

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.