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Sven-Erich Bechtolf's staging of Wagner's Ring returns with Franz Welser-Möst at the helm for the final time, having recently announced his retirement of the cycle from his repertoire. 

Christof Loy unearths hidden treasure with an opera by Franz Schreker long since buried after taking Europe by storm in the 1920s.

More of a distraction than an enhancement, Ulrich Rasche’s giant steel machine grinds down the performers of this dark Elektra, which ultimately stumbles over its own feet.

Actors double up with singers in Hans Neuenfels' innovative production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail in Vienna. 

An Elektra conducted like Mendelssohnian fairy music, sung not shouted, just as Strauss required.

Juan Diego Flórez was impressive in his first portrayal of a lovesick soldier/priest in Manon, with Nino Machaidze's accomplished heroine. Andrei Serban's modern and thoughtful production was still fresh and arresting.

The backstory doesn’t bode well: three fugitive criminals decide to found a city that will pander to society’s most vital needs: food, sex, warfare, and alcohol.

A superlative cast and perceptive staging make for a gripping revival of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at the Glyndebourne Festival.

A reading full of emotion from conductor Juraj Valčuha sets up one of the best San Carlo Orchestra’s performances of this season.

In David Hermann's new production, confusion reigns, but the performance is saved by the singing. 

The set is a stark, grubby nonentity. A central concave structure spits out each scene's requisites, flashing up like apparitions from the vortex of Wozzeck's mind.

Every operatic ingredient was thrown into the pot for H.K. Gruber's Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald (Tales from the Vienna Woods), but do too many cooks spoil this operatic broth?

Die Zauberflöte may well tell us something about the Human Condition, but its staging in Zurich serves more to distract from the music and the messages than it does to support them.

Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos was first performed in 1912, in a production directed by Max Reinhardt. Unlike the version usually seen today, this first Ariadne was a long-winded play-opera-ballet hybrid, incorporating a full production of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme with dances to incidental music by Strauss followed by the short opera.