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Although abbreviated, Pinchgut Opera's production of Handel's Rinaldo makes a powerful dramatic impact and exemplifies high musical values, with excellent orchestral playing and consistently fine singing.

Carried by a handful of standout performances, Britten’s story of madness and infection comes into its own in 2021, in the Opéra National du Rhin's clever and inventive staging. 

“How Excellent.”  The first words sung in Handel’s Saul are in praise of God and were first uttered in a performance nearly three centuries ago. But they apply equally to Claus Guth’s interpretation of the work staged by Theater an der Wien.

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.

Calixto Bieito sets Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea in a hedonist, decadent society whose citizens are defined by their egotism, ambition and sexual exploits.

Pinchgut Opera's L'incoronazione di Poppea is a glorious feast of singing, acting and playing but the production is brutal, taking Monteverdi's vision of corruption in high places to excessive lengths.

Opera Vlaanderen revives a production of Handel's Agrippina based on American soap operas of the 1980s.

An especially adapted version of Purcell's Fairy Queen, reworked by Timothy Nelson, inspires an exceptional reading from a talented young cast at Iford. 

A very creative reading – both scenically and musically – of Engelbert Humperdinck’s fairy tale opera Hänsel und Gretel for Theater an der Wien's final production of the season at the Kammeroper.

Agrippina was a force to be reckoned with: the granddaughter, sister, niece, wife and mother of four Roman Emperors (and lover, incestuously, of at least two). As Mary Beard points out in her brilliant programme introduction, “Agrippina was probably the best connected woman that the Roman world ever saw” – and one of the most ruthless.

When the Baroque movement in art ended, the backlash was severe. The very adjective became an insult: the cold, clear, rarefied eye of 18th-century Neoclassicism found its opulence stifling, its luxury oppressive, and its profusion of ornament, ugly.

In spite of the fact that a Handel oratorio, however renowned, provides limited opportunities for staging, this production of Joshua, directed by Charles Edwards, is a largely successful exercise in the art of the possible.

Riccardo Primo, Re d’Inghilterra (or in English, Richard I), is Handel’s only opera based on the story of an English monarch, and it was premiered in the coronation year of King George II in 1727 (although in fact it was composed the year before but postponed).