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Laurence Cummings and the AAM serve up Messiah-shaped serenity at the Barbican. 

Miller's production, running since 1987, is starting to show its ago, but an excellent performance from Anna Devin keeps English National Opera's latest revival moving.

A forgettable Hansel and Gretel is the worst offence of Antony McDonald’s leaden staging which returns to Covent Garden. 

Polly Graham's take on Mozart's Così fan tutte is full of humour and political commentary, while the singing is a joy to hear. 

Tara Erraught stars as the eponymous heroine with Anna Devin as her nemesis Elizabeth I in Donizetti's Maria Stuarda, but Tom Creed's modern update fails to convince at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. 

Corelli and a triple-decker sandwich on the south coast, with three arias from Handel’s Messiah separated by two concertos from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Blazers and breastplates! This Rinaldo is already eight years old! It’s played at the BBC Proms while almost 40 performances have graced Glyndebourne’s festival and tour up to now, so it must be doing something right.

A thoroughly satisfying, entertaining production of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte from Irish National Opera. Anna Devin delivers a delightful Pamina and Nick Pritchard a convincing Tamino. 

Competent if underwhelming Handel from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Maxim Emelyanchev.

Barrie Kosky's punchy, visually exhilarating take on Saul, with Iestyn Davies as a sublime David, makes for a powerful evening of drama at Glyndebourne.

Anna Devin's Cleopatra moved with complete conviction for scheming minx to mature woman in love.

The biggest stigma associated with opera in Ireland is not that it is an elitist art form, but that it is not “Irish”, and that it doesn’t belong to Irish culture, more of a recent import, like pasta, or avocado.

Lars Vogt, Royal Nothern Sinfonia and Chorus and a strong quartet of soloists bring the angelic tidings of peace and goodwill in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.

Inventive comedy and excellent musicality bring Sir Thomas Allen’s traditional production back to life.

Lothar Koenigs conducted a musically excellent and dramatically straightforward performance of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro in Cardiff.

Francesca Caccini’s La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola di Alcina, performed at the Medici court in Florence in 1625, is said to be the first opera composed by a female composer.

Barrie Kosky's production, revived for the tour, turns Handel’s 1739 Old Testament oratorio Saul into a gripping psychodrama. 

If “all the world’s a jest”, as Sir John Falstaff claims at the end of Verdi’s final operatic masterpiece, then we need players – and directors – with a sense of frivolity. Robert Carsen truly delivers. 

Is Handel’s Semele an oratorio or an opera? Of course Handel himself called it an oratorio but some suggest it is the English-language opera that he never wrote. 

A star-studded Alcina delights at the Barbican, though remains less than the sum of its considerable parts. 

Through His Teeth is a gripping psychological drama. Bedford was commissioned by the Royal Opera House to write a piece on the subject of Faust, to run alongside the star-studded performances of Gounod’s opera on the main stage. Heartily recommended to anybody in need of an evening of modern drama and violence.

The story of Hansel and Gretel is at least 200 years old – the Brothers Grimm, those avid collectors of German folklore, first published it in 1812. And this well-loved tale’s longevity is something that Garsington Opera’s new production draws attention to from the outset. During the overture, a group of shadowy figures drop pages from a book, which Hansel and Gretel collect with glee.

The world of opera can sometimes be hard for the newcomer to love as there are often fiendishly complicated and frequently unbelievable plots to get to grips with. Jules Massenet’s opera Werther is happily none of these: it is a straightforward story of unrequited love.

The music of Bradford-born composer Frederick Delius (1862–1934) is a love or hate affair. Whether you bask in the romantic lushness of his godless and nature-influenced ramblings, or find yourself drowning in a poor-quality school soup consisting of unappetisingly vague harmonic shifts, he is a composer that inspires passionate discussion.

Probably no other work in the repertoire has such mystical status as Bach's Matthew Passion. Phrases like "The Greatest Work in the Western Canon", trip glibly off the tongue while failing to illuminate its greatness or acknowledge its strangeness. It is the sacred cow of sacred cows.

Murder. Suicide. Grand larceny. Puccini's triptych of short operas, two tragedies followed by a riotous farce, always makes for an evening of variety, with the potential for many snatches of greatness.

A split-level stage featuring an ornate stairwell and scaffolding was the setting for this the tenth Jette Parker Young Artists’ Summer Performance. Entitled ‘Veneziana’, the specially compiled programme embodied the visions of Venice dreamt by Rossini, Donizetti, Britten and Offenbach in six sets of Opera Scenes.