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Orla Boylan’s creation oozes charisma and reeks of entitlement, driven to emotional cruelty by the lassitude of a life too-long lived.

Michael Barker-Caven sets Aida in a 21st-century war zone in the Middle-East, allowing the audience to focus on the human drama.

If there's any way to characterise Trevino's approach to Mahler, it is that he is neither bashful nor shy. 

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.

Based on Irish mythology, Opera Theatre Company deiver a compelling concert performance of an exceedingly rare Irish opera Eithne 

With a combined age of 161 years, John Copley and Steuart Bedford certainly bring ample experience to Grange Festival's new production of Britten's Albert Herring. 

Opera North's concert version of Puccini's Turandot in Leeds Town Hall, conducted by Sir Richard Armstrong, is magnificent

Irish soprano Orla Boylan offers an engaging performance of Ravel's Shéhérazade and Sibelius' Luonnotar while the NSO under the baton of Brönnimann deliver a commendable Sibelius 5. 

Fine singing from Simon O’Neill and Orla Boylan in New Zealand Opera's production of Tosca.

The auditorium's lights flared up, drawing a blinking audience back into the room. The fourth wall was well and truly broken, and each of us was given no option but to acknowledge our responsibility for the planet.

A brilliantly successful performance of Götterdämmerung by Opera North to bring its four-year Ring to a fiery close. 

It is interesting that neither of the 200th anniversaries of Verdi and Wagner have received much attention in Oslo, especially when compared to the frenzy that has been dominating so many concert halls and opera houses all over the world. What is even more interesting is that it has only been the Oslo Philharmonic that has paid any kind of attention to the two composers.

The sole complete opera contribution to Wagner’s anniversary in Auckland this year came in the form of New Zealand Opera’s production of Der fliegende Holländer. This was the first staged performance of a Wagner opera in Auckland for over 20 years (though we’ve had a few in concert), and it is a pleasure to report that New Zealand Opera welcomed the master back with a fascinating performance.

Of the various possible ways of conducting Wagner's Flying Dutchman, ENO's Edward Gardner took the direct approach. From the first tremolo string notes, the orchestra launched into the main leitmotif at full tilt, followed by the sound of stormy seas swirling more furiously than you've ever heard them, leaving the audience breathless.

Queen of Spades began life as a sharp little ghost story by Alexander Pushkin, quite different in tone and spirit from the melodramatic adaptation by Modest Tchaikovsky, who wrote the libretto for his composer brother.

Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos boasts the most confusing cast list of any opera. Ariadne and Bacchus feature either as themselves or as "primadonna" and "tenor", in addition to figures from Greek mythology, we get Commedia dell'arte names like Scaramuccio and Truffaldino, there are backstage characters like the composer, the music master and the wigmaker, and a spoken part of the Major-Domo.