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Dorset Opera Festival's bold decision to programme Massenet's obscure opera about a medieval Castilian hero proves to be a major success.

Another masterful, sprightly and unstuffily fun production of Handel at Iford: Christopher Cowell's Partenope is erotically charged, well cast and comically compelling. 

Dorset Opera's second opera of their season saw a fiendishly good performance from Mark S Doss as Méphistophélès supported by a strong cast in Christopher Cowell's economical production.

A welcome revival of a Russian rarity from the student forces of the Royal Academy of Music.

Weather forecasters would have a meteorological field day with Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Snow Maiden. Freezing temperatures have prevailed for sixteen years, and the immediate outlook in the Prologue is for further isolated snow showers, before a warm front eventually sweeps in from the south during Act IV. 

Over the years, I’ve generally found performances at Royal Academy Opera to be enjoyable and straightforward. This production of Cendrillon went rather beyond that.

It had lain in the archives of the British Library since around 1986. Now, rediscovered by a PhD student and transcribed by Stephen Anthony-Brown, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s opera Thelma has at last received its world première in the capable hands of Surrey Opera.It’s a small miracle that Thelma, written between 1907 and 1909, came to be performed at all.