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The Philadelphia Orchestra offers a musically and dramatically urgent performance of Wagner’s complete opera, buoyed by world-class soloists.

Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's ode to humanity, returning after an eleven-year absence, suffers from generalized acting and inconsistent musical values.

Janáček’s drama of infanticide is delivered at full power by Nina Stemme and Agneta Eichenholz in Annilese Miskimmon’s well-crafted production. The orchestra, however, are just too loud.

The Baden-Baden Easter Festival presents an extraordinary performance of Elektra, with Nina Stemme in the title role and the Berliner Philharmoniker, led by Kirill Petrenko, in a stark and modern production. 

Christof Loy’s thoughtful staging enlightens the character of the protagonists in Sophocles’ tale of matricide; Sir Antonio Pappano extracts great nuance and beauty from Strauss’ score.

Claus Guth's production foregrounds the regimented, repressive world that drives the plot of Janáček’s tragic masterpiece.

Conducting the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, the Latvian Andris Poga reveals a surer hand in Shostakovich's final symphonic statement than in the partnering of Nina Stemme in Wagner, where her big voice often missed the essential intimacy.

Two sopranos bring intensity and tenderness to Strauss’ powerful opera in a revival of the timeless production by Patrice Chéreau.

Director Lotte De Beer's thoroughly realized, aesthetically rich and beautifully executed production of Janáček's masterpiece is anchored by strong performances from Nina Stemme and Svetlana Aksenova.

The Festival d'Aix-en-Provence gives us a definitive performance of Wagner's opera – but for listening only.

Karina Canellakis leads the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in Wagner and Strauss with style and sophistication.

Nina Stemme returns to Hobart and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra under Marko Letonja, with an all-Wagner concert, ably assisted by Swedish bassJohn Lundgren 

A semi-staged performance of the two early 20th-century modernist works at the New York Philharmonic featured excellent soloists, great production and an inspired orchestra led by Jaap van Zweden.

The outstanding trio of Nylund, Stemme and Herlitzius soars above a Vienna State Opera Orchestra in thunderous form, led by Christian Thielemann to celebrate the Staatsoper's 150th birthday in style.

A standout performance from Stephen Milling complements all-round excellence of cast to provide a satisfying end to the Covent Garden Ring.

Wagner's storytelling shines brightly with the aid of a cast well out of the ordinary. Vinke, Stemme, Siegel and Lundgren make part 3 of The Ring an unforgettable evening of opera.

We start with a triumphant Royal Opera debut from Stuart Skelton, we close with Nina Stemme at her finest; a thrilling orchestral performance links the two. A memorable Walküre.

Instead of telling a story of spiritual enlightenment and ultimate redemption through faith, Pierre Audi's reading is bereft of mystery and magic.

The Cleveland Orchestra celebrated its 100th anniversary with a memorable concert performance of Tristan und Isolde with magnificent Nina Stemme.

After staged performances in Baden Baden, the Berlin Phil's Parsifal is presented in concert at the Philharmonie, with a couple of key cast changes. 

Claus Guth’s grandiose production of Parsifal made major headlines in Zurich in 2011. With its new cast of principals, this revival is no less a sensation.

Despite a strong vocal and orchestral performance, David Hockney's sets are still the main draw for San Francisco Opera's Turandot. 

An exceptional musical performance was enhanced by a streamlined but ultimately moving staging in an evening of near perfection in Dresden.

Under Mariss Jansons, the Vienna Philharmonic are on top form in Shostakovich's opera; together with a top class cast of singers, they create sonic and emotional intoxication.

Ragnarök: the Swedish title for Götterdämmerung resonates with Old Norse folk memories of universal inundation and overthow of the order of the gods.

A performance of Wagner's Siegfried stands or falls by its titular hero and Lars Cleveman is highly experienced. 

Stemme as Brünnhilde delivered her opening battle cry in Victorian riding habit like one of Trollope's racier fox- hunting heroines.

Director Mariusz Treliński’s previous work at the Met, in conjunction with Boris Kudlicka’s sets and Bartek Macias’ videos, was a double bill of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle.

The late director Patrice Chéreau's last work, Elektra, was brilliantly realized at the Met, with special credit to conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and soprano Nina Stemme.

In Zurich, a dazzling production of Puccini's great Turandot gives us the stuff of torment, torture and all the other idiosyncracies of love at the executuve level.

If ever there were a voice that required the big hall of the Musikverein, it would be that of Nina Stemme. 

Nina Stemme leads a successful revival of the Schenk production with a brilliant orchestra led by a passionate Ádám Fischer.

Riccardo Chailly kicks off his interim role as Principal Director at La Scala with Turandot, featuring Luciano Berio's ending, a score he knows like the back of his hand. 

Nina Stemme makes a memorable role debut as Elektra in Vienna in a new production set in a coal-filled basement of a 1910 Viennese town house.

Nina Stemme's domination of the heaviest dramatic soprano repertoire continues with an outstanding Isolde at the Zurich Opera House, ably assisted by Stephen Gould, Matti Salminen, and other notable performers under John Fiore.

First class performances from Stephen Gould and Nina Stemme are backed by a magnificent orchestral performance in the Royal Opera's revival of Christof Loy's spartan production.

A respectable performance by Deutsche Oper Berlin, raised to another level by Nina Stemme in the title role

Nina Stemmes' glorious Brünnhilde crowns a towering performance of Götterdämmerung at the Vienna State Opera. 

The Royal Swedish Opera's Salome, directed by operatic first-timer Sofia Jupither, is dramatic, and its strong directorial concept does not get in the way of the story. Nina Stemme sings astoundingly, and gives a nuanced portrayal of the title character.

Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, in its new production by Marco Arturo Marelli, features excellent singing from top to bottom, tight orchestral playing, beautiful lighting, and a decisive lack of cowboys, saloons and other “Wild West” clichés. Set in a modern-day mining village in the middle of somewhere vast and gorgeous, the production focuses on the social interplay and struggles of the miners.

The world ended again last night. It ends fairly frequently in performances and in recordings, and that schedule tends to innoculate us against Richard Wagner’s political and philosophical messages. If ever there were to be a performance to transcend that, it would come at the Proms, at the conclusion of its first full performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

The third part of Daniel Barenboim’s Ring cycle at the Proms proved to be similarly successful to the first two operas of the cycle, leaving both audience and conductor apparently delighted at its conclusion.The chief justification for “semi-staged” productions such as this is that they encourage greater focus on the music, and particularly on the orchestra.

Dipping my toes into the murky waters of the Wagner-fest at the Proms this year for the first time, I found myself confronted with the monumental second installment of the Ring cycle, Die Walküre.

Think of all the adjectives typically used to report on the best of female Wagner singing; add lyrical phrasing and imagine the absence of any shrillness, and you have come as close as possible to a description of the perfection that Nina Stemme achieved in her first Isolde for the Wiener Staatsoper.

An obsessively man-hating princess, a slave girl who really needs to open up a bit more about her feelings, a prince who actually fell in love at first sight, and an unhealthily large dose of exoticism? Why, it can only be Puccini’s Turandot.

Strauss’ Don Juan has a long tradition as one of the Vienna Philharmonic’s more dazzling curtain-openers but a recent tendency, even with Gustavo Dudamel, who conducted this work with the orchestra last autumn, has been for more subdued accounts which downplay the brilliance and virtuosity of the orchestral writing.

“When I looked at you, I heard secret music,” says Salome in her monologue to the severed head of John the Baptist. Richard Strauss’s opera trades in the unseeable and the unknowable—from the range of metaphors applied to the moon to the nearly impossible staging of a ten-minute striptease performed by a dramatic soprano—which makes it unusually well suited to concert presentation.

Two of the world’s most sought-after opera singers giving Lieder recitals on the same night. The kind of painful choice which Viennese musical institutions and their chaotic schedules throw up all too regularly. I went for Nina Stemme over Jonas Kaufmann on the basis that she gives fewer solo recitals, despite harbouring reservations about how her big voice would fare in this repertoire.