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Questionable conducting aside, The Royal Opera's latest revival of Damiano Michieletto’s fluid production of the famous operatic double-bill is terrifically executed by two excellent casts.

With more cast reshuffles than in Downing Street of late, this revival of Damiano Michieletto's intertwined Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci double bill triumphs against the odds.

Dressed in white, with an origami swan in his hand, Robert Alagna's Lohengrin is less a Grail knight than an absent-minded daydreamer.

A pleasurable evening of surprises in Marco Arturo Marelli’s Turandot.

The French-Sicilian tenor shines in Sir David's McVicar's pristine take on Umberto Giordano's slice of verismo. 

The Met's new season opens with a new Samson et Dalila only marginally more trashy than Saint-Saëns’ peculiar brand of kitschy orientalism.

Saint-Saëns' exotic dip into the Bible is given a cool update in Alexandra Liedtke's new production at the Wiener Staatsoper.

David McVicar's uninspiring Cavalleria rusticana remains problematic, but a strong Pagliacci leaves the New York audience gasping. 

Vienna stages an all-star new production of Verdi's classic, with sublime singing in Daniele Abbado's Spanish Civil War setting.

Anthony Minghella's Madama Butterfly is still one of the best productions running at the Met at the moment, and Kristine Opolais was the dramatic star of the evening.

The Met's new production of Manon Lescaut with Kristine Opolais and Roberto Alagna has great potential to be successful musically, but the production is mixed at best.

The Met’s revival of David McVicar’s year-old take on the perennial Verismo twins strikes out emotionally in Cavalleria rusticana but scores high in Pagliacci. Working on the same set by Rae Smith, flanked by the forbidding stone walls of the town church, Cavalleria is dark, dark, dark – the very picture of a poor, unhappy Sicilian hill town.

A modern updating of Vasco da Gama's discovery of a sea route to India? Vera Nemirova's stylish production of Meyerbeer's Grand Opéra works inteligently for the most part. 

With outstanding performances from Roberto Alagna and Paul Gay, Pierre Corneille's elegant poetry shines through the return of Massenet's Le Cid to the Opéra de Paris, more than a century after it was last seen there.

Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette attracted a large audience for a concert performance from Madrid, enticed by Roberto Alagna's Roméo.

From Otello's opening thunderstorm, Myung Whun Chung and the Orchestre Philharmonique de France leave us gasping, while Alagna turns in a magnetic performance in the title role.

The Royal Opera House revives Jonathan Kent's traditional production, but with a crucial lack of magnetism between hero and heroine, Puccini's taut thriller feels somewhat muzzled.

This opera gala saw the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra mark their 15th anniversary with an unforgettable evening. The BIPO were joined by tenor Roberto Alagna, making his Istanbul debut, and mezzo-soprano Roxana Constantinescu, a rising star.

Goethe’s epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (“The Sorrows of Young Werther”) hit the 1774 zeitgeist not only because it brought back emotion to the rather sober Age of Enlightenment, but because the tragic title hero sports a multi-faceted character that lends itself to various interpretations and projections, therefore making it easy to feel sympathy or even partly identify with the

Yesterday I went to see a convoluted story about French revolutionaries, as belted out at top volume to serviceable but hardly creative ballads. No, I didn’t go to the Les misérables movie. I went to see Roberto Alagna in Opera Orchestra of New York’s concert presentation of Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier.

Take one hapless but lovable hero, one capricious but ultimately vulnerable heroine, a doctor and an army officer straight out of commedia dell’arte, a couple of basso buffo patter songs, at least one memorable romantic ballad, and stir the lot into a good lashing of boisterous Italian music with a sprinkling of furtive tears.

Read our review of Nicholas Hytner's production of Verdi­'s Don Carlo in its 2010 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.

Read our review of Richard Eyre's production of Carmen by Bizet in its 2010 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.

Read our review of Nicolas Joël's production of Puccini­'s La Rondine in its 2009 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.

Read our review of Guy Joosten's production of Gounod­'s Roméo et Juliette in its 2007 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.