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The French director updates the action to the present day, underscoring the validity of the plot – feuding families and class differences are still relevant. 

The second performance of the Met's Pearl Fishers saw one of the leads withdraw mid-performance again. A welcome performance by young baritone Alexander Birch Elliott could not rescue the evening. 

It's a big night at the Opéra Bastille for their 350th anniversary season; Oropesa's dazzling coloratura stops the show; Andreas Kriegenburg sets the action interestingly in a Star Trek future.

Unlike the conucopia of duets Verdi wrote for soprano and baritone, his music for soprano and bass is much more limited and what exists is not exactly the acme of his output.

Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda is perhaps most famous for a single and highly emotional scene in which two monarchs engage in a venomous confrontation. One is doomed to die. 

Offenbach's vivid setting of ETA Hoffmann's fantastic tales gets an enjoyable outing, with Spyres, Testé and Pudova the undoubted stars of the show.

Visually this production fully rendered the opera's atmosphere. The director was good at encompassing the private stories and emotions of the three main characters into a broader context, dominated by Fate.

Les Pêcheurs de Perles is a graceful if senseless piece, composed when Georges Bizet was only 25 years old and miles away from the psycho-musical drama of Carmen.

Kent Nagano and the OSM came up trumps in concert version of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

The two leads in the brand-new cast of the Met’s three year old production of Massenet’s Manon were unbeatable. 

International opera stars Piotr Beczala, Diana Damrau and Nicolas Testé delight the public of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, but their vocal prowess do not quite compensate for an ill-constructed program.

Iain Bell’s new opera A Harlot’s Progress, premièred at the Theater an der Wien this month, has much going for it. Its chances for making it into modern repertory are good – if people can handle the depressing plot.

Puccini’s Tosca is no stranger to the stages of Paris. With almost 300 performances of this opera to date at the Opéra National de Paris, Tosca has become, alongside Mozart’s Le Nozze de Figaro and Bizet’s Carmen, a staple of Paris’ opera houses.However, such popularity opens up challenges.