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David Pountney's vernacular translation and Ruth Knight's vivid staging lent a thrilling immediacy to Shostakovich's chilling opera.

A star-is-born performance from the young American bass David Leigh anchors a thrilling performance of the Ring cycle's dramatic conclusion.

The summer festival closes with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra playing Tippett and Beethoven. 

Amanda Majeski reprises her peerless Kátya, but Katarina Dalayman's flint-like characterisation as Kabanicha strikes the most sparks.

Sir Antonio Pappano molds a dramatic yet intimate performance of Britten's great choral work, powerful and moving.

Claus Guth’s Don Giovanni returns to Amsterdam with an almost entirely new cast with strong leads by Seth Carico and Adrian Sâmpetrean. 

Amanda Majeski is magnificent in the title role; Ed Gardner shows total master of Janáček's music. But that's not enough to rescue a poorly thought out Richard Jones production.

Phelim McDermott’s new Met production is set in Brooklyn’s Coney Island in the late 1950s and is brilliantly vivid looking, but Mozart's music plays second fiddle. 

The final instalment of the Hong Kong Philharmonic's Ring cycle merits the orchestra joining the international big league. 

Marble and solitude: Willy Decker's view of La clemenza di Tito is revived with a strong cast at L'Opéra de Paris.

Don Giovanni is an opera which has as its title character a man who is an unrepentant womaniser, who ultimately receives his just reward in one of the most famous scenes in opera where he is consumed into the fires of hell.

With the many glories of the score and the easy butts of class and marital comedy, it is hard not to be pleased by a Figaro performance, although tonight’s did not sparkle as much as it might have. 

Maestro Leo Hussain’s translucent rendition of the score made Capriccio the crowning glory of the Santa Fe Opera Season.  

“Honour your masters!” Sachs instructs Walther in the final scene. Wagner's spirit was honoured well as Glyndebourne's festival opened, but did the song contest necessarily crown the right winner?  

With clear direction and well-executed hits (such as the lush trio from the end of the third act), the show will appeal to those with nostalgia for the production and wish to escape the biting cold with the sound of strings warmed by horns.

What makes this Figaro memorable and admirable is the way it manages both to be sprightly in its tone and details and also luxuriant in places that another director might have blown through.

David Pountney's production of Mieczysław Weinberg's opera The Passenger travels to Chicago. 

Richard Eyre’s witty direction may weight Figaro too heavily towards bedroom farce than satirical drama, but with sparky acting it’s difficult not to be won over. 

Amanda Majeski and Joyce DiDonato are exceptional as Vitellia and Sesto in David McVicar's production of La clemenza di Tito at the Lyric Opera.

On Friday, a new co-production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg opened at the Lyric. The only comedy among Wagner’s mature music dramas, its sound is very much like that of the better-known tragedies – brassy, overfull, with a core of strings teetering at vibrato’s edge.