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The evening starts with life-affirming Beethoven – and then, the Budapest Festival Orchestra demonstrate just how good native Hungarians can be in Bartók’s chiller. 

Individual performances impress, but conducting and production both prove too meandering in this year’s Wagner Days Tannhäuser.

Juliana Zara and Annemarie Kremer lead the cast in a riotous, yet deeply touching, new production from Nederlandse Reisopera. 

The Bayerische Staatsoper's new production of Falstaff makes the mistake of turning a comedy into a slapstick, but the fine ensemble have the last say as they stand in silence and defiance to face the empty auditorium.

Julius Drake’s torrential postlude capped an evening in which he had been superb throughout.

Willy Decker's production, presented in Zürich in 2014, is revived at the Hamburgische Staatsoper with most of the same cast

Mozart's very notes become servant to the cause in an ingenious staging of Le nozze di Figaro by one of today's most esteemed directors.

Dichterliebe is a Lieder programme staple but performances of Schumann’s anti-song cycle, the Op. 39 Liederkreis, are much harder to come by. The latter work fascinates me more, with its themes, in the twelve Eichendorff poems carefully selected by Schumann, of broken, alienated subjects longing for that from which they are cut off, namely love, nature, and some guarantee of existential wellbeing.