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A standout performance by Alison Langer as Gilda lights up an Opera Holland Park season opener marred by illness. 

Swedish soprano Malin Byström returns to Sir David McVicar's production at Covent Garden, where she is now probably unsurpassed in the role, vocally and histrionically.

Using Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick's distillations of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, the company concluded its miniature Ring cycle in under five hours, without sacrificing musical or dramatic tension.

 Longborough Festival Opera’s ongoing Ring cycle returns to its fully staged form with a triumphant new Siegfried.

Wagnerites can get their fix in London this week, where Die Walküre opens the Grimeborn Festival in Julia Burbach's new production of the adaptation by Graham Vick and Jonathan Dove. 

A good, honest staging and solid singing add up to an excellent new production – its third – at Opera Holland Park. 

After nearly two decades away from the Covent Garden stage, it was time Britten's Billy Budd came home, in a new production from Madrid by Deborah Warner. 

Woefully stiff acting lets down an otherwise excellent production; Joseph Calleja impresses in his role début as Cavaradossi.

I arrived at the Royal Opera House in the usual way, settled into my seat, and – could you believe it – the opera was gone!

Tchaikovsky's High Gothic opera about gambling obsessions is worth seeing for a first class staging, albeit with a mixed musical performance.

Gerald Barry’s deliciously anarchic operatic setting of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest returns to the London stage.

Opera Holland Park give us a broad span of human joys and tragedies in an excellently staged and acted rendering of Puccini's Il trittico.

Martin Lloyd-Evan's highly sensitive production features a show-stealing performance by Richard Burkhard but is marred by problems of orchestral balance.

Stephen Barlow’s staging of Puccini's Western is easy on the eye, if short on verismo. Susannah Glanville impresses as the barkeeper with a heart of gold.

In his programme note, director John Fulljames remarked that “any opera has many layers of authorship”, and that is truer of American Lulu than most.Alban Berg compiled the original libretto for Lulu (1929–34) from two plays by Frank Wedekind: Erdgreist (“Earth Spirit”, 1895) and Die Büsche der Pandora (“Pandora’s Box”, 1904). At the time of Berg”s death in 1935 the third act remained incomplete.

Interviewed at the Barbican Centre last year, Stephen Fry described Gerald Barry’s score for The Importance of Being Earnest (2010) rather unfavourably as “taking a machete to a soufflé”. However, this zany opera based on Oscar Wilde’s classic play of 1895 has already emerged victorious from concert premières in Los Angeles and London.

With Verdi's centenary coming up, his last opera Falstaff has had more attention than usual, with this production at Opera Holland Park following hot on the heels of Robert Carsen's new production at Covent Garden.

After their Mascagni debut last year, with L’amico Fritz (the composer’s first post-Cavalleria opera), Opera Holland Park have set out to uncover more music from the so-called ‘one-hit-wonder’ – still known to most for his smash verismo opera alone.

Pietro Mascagni was catapulted to enduring fame in 1889 when his Cavalleria Rusticana won a competition. But the problem with all Italian opera composers at the end of the 19th century was simple: if you weren't Puccini, it was more or less impossible to avoid his shadow.

Gaetano Donizetti's commedia dell'arte-inspired Don Pasquale is one of the favourites in the opera buffa repertoire. At its ending, the assembled company boisterously enjoin us to remember that when an elderly man marries a much younger woman, no good can result.Apparently, the same is not true of an elderly conductor joining a much younger orchestra.