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Jack Furness directs a terrific new Queen of Spades at Garsington – haunting and harrowing. 

Laurence Cummings and The English Concert deliver musical excellence in a wonderfully designed and choreographed production.

An exquisitely matched pair of sopranos as Susanna and the Countess make up for some quirky casting elsewhere. 

A decent cast was unable to redeem a fundamentally dull opera that lacks the psycholgical complexity and tension of both the original Graham novel and its famous Hitchcock adaptation.

Deep in Dorset, Anna Patalong gives a powerful Tatyana, ably supported by a well-taught chorus in an English translation of Tchaikovsky's opera of hearts and friendships broken.

Would a younger soprano taking the role of Tatyana blur Kasper Holten's "dancing doubles" vision of Eugene Onegin at the Royal Opera House?

A double bill of Tchaikovsky's Iolanta and Stravinsky's Perséphone fares strongly in Aix-en-Provence. 

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

Britten's score achieves his usual kaleidoscope of different colours, played marvellously by the City of London Sinfonia under Steuart Bedford. Annilese Miskimmon's production yields an intense dose of psycho-dramatic tension.

Last night’s opening of Christopher Alden’s allusive, conceptual Rigoletto for ENO, a co-production with Canadian Opera Company, was a notable event for London opera. Musically, ENO have been on top of their game this season and last night was no exception.

After Cavalli’s Ercole Amante in 2009 and Handel’s Deidamia in 2011, De Nederlandse Opera is continuing its exploration of obscure Baroque operas with Gluck’s Armide, until 27 October.I always wondered why Armide was Gluck’s own favourite work.

Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari is a bit of a strange fish: a recluse, a self-described mystic, and proud enough of his hybrid German-Italian identity that he appended his mother’s maiden name to his own at the age of nineteen.

Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is one of the most beautiful scores in the operatic repertoire, and I don’t blame people who come to it looking forward to immersing themselves in the warm bath of the familiar story and music.

Handel’s Jephtha is an oratorio, rather than an opera. However, the story is one of high drama and emotion, and thus the work lends itself easily to operatic adaptation.

The West End/Broadway musical is alive and well, raking in millions with its blend of light music, song and dance routines and not-too-taxing drama. But its spiritual ancestor, the operetta, is an unfashionable beast.

Young man spurns the love of a good woman. Time passes. Man realises the error of his ways, but it is too late. It's not exactly the most taxing of plot lines, but in Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin turned it into a masterpiece.

ENO's latest première matches a young theatre director with a reputation for cutting-edge drama to one of the earliest operas in the repertoire, in the less-than-conventionally-operatic surroundings of London's Young Vic. It's an improbable combination, and I wasn't at all sure what to expect.