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What makes Stéphane Braunschweig's production exceptional is its ability to reveal the opera's beating heart without resorting to didacticism. 

One of Handel's lesser operas receives a deluxe concert performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, with Il Pomo d'Oro and a fine array of singers. 

One of the world's top period instrument ensembles bring Handel's Water Music and other baroque classics to Klosters.

Scottish Opera's Don Pasquale is a well sung and fun-filled delight to lift the winter spirits.

The Concertgebouw has been celebrating its 125th anniversary throughout 2013. On the darkest, rainiest Sunday evening in months, the Combattimento Consort Amsterdam defied the oncoming winter with a joyous, exuberant performance, one of a series of special celebratory concerts for this jubilee year.

In Harry Fehr’s much-anticipated new production of The Flying Dutchman for Scottish Opera, the setting is in Scotland – as Wagner had originally intended before a last-minute switch to Norway during rehearsals for the first production in 1843.

The world of opera can sometimes be hard for the newcomer to love as there are often fiendishly complicated and frequently unbelievable plots to get to grips with. Jules Massenet’s opera Werther is happily none of these: it is a straightforward story of unrequited love.

Scottish Opera’s final production of the season was a revival of the much-loved 1980 production of Tosca by the late Anthony Besch, redirected here by Jonathan Cocker. Besch was struck by the political parallel between the Napoleonic era of the 1800s and Italy under Mussolini in the 1940s, and he made the bold choice to set this production in 1943.

Intermezzo is an opera based on the real life happenings in the relationship between Richard Strauss and his wife Pauline, characterised on stage as Robert and Christine Storch. Maestro Robert takes on a long conducting stint in Vienna, leaving Christine in her country house with their eight year old son Franzl, and a retinue of staff.