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Damiano Michieletto directs a slick and frequently hilarious staging of Prokofiev's comic opera Betrothal in a Monastery. 

Lydia Steier's new production of Candide is a kaleidoscopic celebration of Leonard Bernstein's varied musical idioms. 

Marlene Monteiro Freitas directs her first opera, in which Lulu, if not buried alive, is certainly left completely unrecognizable. 

Vasily Barkhatov directs a new production of Mieczysław Weinberg's rarely staged, massive and unwieldy opera at the MuseumsQuartier. 

“Lima darf nicht Österreich werden!” Offenbach's operetta is set in Lima, but really it’s Vienna in director Nikolaus Habjan uproarious production. 

Hannah Eisendle's Heliosis proves the highlight of Prom 36, with Benjamin Grosvenor giving a performance of quality in Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto.

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.

Leoncavallo's opera is a rare example of a tragic, verismo opera where not a soul dies... neither by natural causes nor foul play.  

Keith Warner directs a new opera which packs in betrayal, murder, oppression, freedom, love and the Spanish Inquisition into a mere 90 minutes.

Vienna's Theater an der Wien stage a seldom performed opera by Carl Maria von Weber with an excellent cast, orchestra, and chorus.  

Hagen, the first chapter in the Theater an der Wien's reimagining of The Ring, features music from Das Rhinegold and Götterdämmerung woven seamlessly together, telling the story from the perspective of Hagen, son of Nibelung dwarf, Alberich.

Tatjana Gürbaca’s whole scale tampering with Wagner’s Siegfried had so many flashbacks and flashforwards there should have been a warning for photosensitive members of the audience.  

Anno Schreier's successful new opera Hamlet is the first of a series of three Shakespeare-inspired offerings from Theater an der Wien this season. 

In the ballad, a lovelorn maiden is finally reunited with her dead lover, who immediately tries to trick her into a midnight wedding at a graveyard after dragging her through muddy swamps filled with ghosts and howling animals. 

Fingers and bows fluttered through dance-like figures and virtuosic passages packed with trills with astonishing clarity and brilliance.

This was a rapturous celebration of creative instrumentation, virtuosity and brilliance that completely engaged and energized.

Though certainly not the most heartwarming of tales this Christmas season, this is a production one shouldn’t miss.

Konwitschny's bold approach to Rihm's musical dialectic surprises, challenges, and bewilders. The glorious soundscape created in the Felsenreitschule makes this Eroberung von Mexico a unique, unmissable operatic experience. 

I have no objection per se with naked women bathing in blood, masturbating to crucifixes or being flagellated by priests in confessional booths, but only if it somehow aids understanding of the story

If you are going to see Verdi’s I due Foscari, this production is likely the way to do it. Although this production is by no means unflawed, there are several reasons that it is a must-see for opera fans in Vienna.

My mother always told me not to sit too close in the theatre, and after seeing this revival of Martin Kusej’s modern realization of Stravinksy’s The Rake’s Progress at the Theater an der Wien, I think I know what she was talking about.Act I begins innocuously enough in a sparse apartment, unfurnished apart from a mattress and a television.

Giuseppe Verdi’s Attila is not an opera that one hears often. Composed during his self-styled “galley period” – before he found his mature musical voice with Rigoletto – Attila has inherent musical and dramaturgical weaknesses. With one foot still firmly rooted in bel canto tradition, the numerous cabalettas can be exhausting, even ridiculous, considering the dramatic nature of the text.

György Ligeti’s Concert Românesc was banned by the Soviet government for the crime of getting too fancy with colouring on dominant chords. Though by no means overly dissonant, especially as compared to Ligeti’s later works, the last few minutes of this work do become ever so slightly crunchy.

Il Trovatore has doggedly survived in opera’s hit charts despite dispensing generous quantities of hair-raising as well as eyebrow-raising content. Verdi’s music is intoxicating, of course, but there is something to this work that makes it accessible beyond reasoning.

Béatrice et Bénédict is Hector Berlioz’s last work; he wrote it between 1860 and 1862 for the theatre that patron Edouard Bénazet had built in Baden-Baden, then Germany’s most chic health resort.

Jean Sibelius is purported to have written part of his Symphony no. 5 after having witnessed a large flock of swans take flight from his home in rural Finland. Whether this story is apocryphal or not, the “swan theme” has become part of the Western musical subconscious, with quotations showing up in jazz and pop music for much of the last century.

Cornelius Meister has long been a champion of young Czech composer Miroslav Srnka, not only as chief conductor of the RSO Wien but also in Heidelberg, where he was Generalmusikdirektor from 2005 until earlier this year.

Following a string of misses, the Theater an der Wien emerges from its recent dry patch with a new production of Puccini’s triptych which offers a winning cast, the best playing heard at the house in months, and a smart production.

Written in 1819 and belonging to the opera seria chapter of Rossini’s career, the florid score of La donna del lago doesn’t so much respond to as resist its unabashedly romantic libretto.

Counting this present concert performance, public outings for Jaromir Weinberger’s 1937 opera Wallenstein may possibly have reached double digits, and such reception details, or indeed any information about the opera beyond a basic synopsis, would have made a welcome addition to the programme.

Deborah Warner’s new production of La Traviata for the Wiener Festwochen is dotted with dramatic ideas to much the same extent as flowers are strewn and champagne is uncorked in the Act I ‘Brindisi’ (drinking song), which is to say sparingly.

For a description of Elisabeth Leonskaja’s formidable and eloquent pianism I find myself drawn to the opening bars of Rachmaninov’s G sharp minor Prelude, given in this concert as an encore.

The German Requiem is an unbudgeable fixture on the Viennese musical calendar, and yet selections from Brahms’ more obscure choral output are seldom programmed, with chorus directors typically citing the unfeasible ratio of rehearsal to running time for complicated works like Nänie (which is less than 15 minutes long).

Arnold Schoenberg rarely forms the backbone of orchestral concerts in either of his two homelands, and in an ideal world there would be more concerts like this, particularly in Vienna.

Iolanta and Francesca da Rimini work particularly well as a double bill because both works share the theme of lovers who find themselves at the mercy of possessive forces. Iolanta's domineering father ultimately yields in Tchaikovsky's opera, but in Rachmaninov's the deceitful Lanceotto is not so accommodating.

Orchestral concerts bookended by Adès and Elgar are nothing new in Britain, but despite both composers being performed with increasing regularity in Vienna over the last few years, this event – to my knowledge – was the first to place them side by side.

Before writing a note of Gogol, composer Lera Auerbach immersed herself in the writer’s complete works and over twenty books written about him. It would take similar efforts to begin to understand this opera: taking us inside the fevered mind of its title character, Gogol is less a biographical narrative set to music than a phantasmagorical, psychological investigation.

If director Luc Bondy has a muse, it’s the Georgian baritone George Gagnidze, blessed with a bulging eyes and a big, craggy voice. After growling and sneering his way through Scarpia in Bondy’s much-maligned Metropolitan Opera production of “Tosca,” Gagnidze is back to do the same to the title role of “Rigoletto” in Bondy’s new production at the Wiener Festwochen.

Never a city to shy away from seasonal programming, this Easter Vienna is offering productions of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, Gounod’s Faust, and Wagner’s Parsifal. The latter two, at the Staatsoper, are familiar, but audiences should run to see the Theater an der Wien’s enthralling revival of Poulenc’s relatively rarely-produced masterwork.