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The Giocoso’s Enescu and Il Giardino Armonico’s Beethoven bookend an exhilarating day of rarities and classics.

Dutch National Opera's superbly sang Così fan tutte is transposed into a teenager summer crush story.

Diego Fasolis leads a period performance of Mozart’s early masterpiece with a strong cast and a clever production.

Harding's grasp of the work's architecture that provides overall coherence. That, combined with the pithy, pulsing core he forges at its heart, makes this performance as engaging as it is polished.

Animated characters are the real stars of an imaginative production of The Magic Flute. 

Robert Carsen's Don Giovanni cannot burn in a hell in which he does not believe. 

Under the baton of René Jacobs, the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin dazzles in the Staatsoper's production of Purcell's "dramatick opera". 

Any production of Le nozze di Figaro in which both Marcellina and Barbarina give star performances is ensemble casting at its finest.

Richard Jones creates forceful theatre by staging Ariodante as a tale of shaming and abuse. Andrea Marcon conducts an accomplished cast and the first-class Concerto Köln.

Adrianne Pieczonka and Anett Fritsch shone in an otherwise disappointing opening night, impaired by poor conducting and unimpressive staging.

“Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It’s a bum’s life,” stated the late, great Marlon Brando. Felix Breisach took this idea to heart when staging his modernized Figaro in a mental institution.

With two happy endings, two recognition scenes, and a second act that seems more of a self-contained sequel than a conclusion to the first, Gluck’s Telemaco has come in for a musicological pasting over the years for its alleged weaknesses of dramatic content and construction.

London audiences had never seen anything quite like it. Fireworks, fountains and live sparrows were just a few of the special effects livening up the premiere of Handel's Rinaldo way back in 1711, prompting the Spectator's critic to compare it sniffily to a Punch and Judy show. Fast forward two hundred years, and you might wonder if there's been any progress.

To Glyndebourne, for the opening night of Handel's Rinaldo, the first of his operas to be staged in London in 1711, when he was just 26 years old.