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A revival of a traditional staging,  with great singers and full of dramatic energy

Ermonela Jaho gives an incomparable vocal acting performance; John Copley's production, 40 years old this year, never fails to enthrall. It's being retired after next season: catch it while you can, and remember to pack the handkerchiefs.

Playing hard to get has its rewards. At least that's what Donizetti tells us in The Elixir of Love that gives a charming opera a fresh take. 

Capitalising on their success with Verdi’s opera Rigoletto during the Aix-en-Provence Festival in the summer, the London Symphony Orchestra and conductor Gianandrea Noseda chose to open the 2013/14 season last night with the same work.

Of all the mischievous dramatic reversals that line Rigoletto’s plot – the hunchbacked jester tricked into abducting his own daughter, the daughter tricked into loving the brainless Duke (posing as a penniless student), and the terrifying reunion of father and daughter in a scene of murder – is not the most breathtaking, after all, the fact that the opera begins with a convincing display of the de

"It was a dark and stormy night …." Chuckling whenever I hear these lines, I can see Charles Schultz’s beloved Snoopy staring intensely at his typewriter, vigorously typing away what he would consider his magnum opus novel.

Those who like their opera off-kilter will revel in the Metropolitan Opera’s Les Contes d'Hoffmann, an opera in three acts (with prologue and epilogue) by Jacques Offenbach. The Met production was heavily operetta à la Offenbach—risqué, and at times, erotic.