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A varied programme had been put together with professionalism and dedication, so plaudits are due to all involved.

It premiered in the same year as Mozart's opera, but Gazzaniga's Don Giovanni is virtually unknown. Despite the best efforts of an energetic student cast it doesn't come close to hitting the heights that Mozart and Da Ponte reached.

An opportunity to hear one of Respighi's operas in the UK is a real treat; the composer's take on Sleeping Beauty, La bella dormente nel bosco, is an ideal companion to to Ravel's  L'Enfant et les sortilèges in a terrific double bill at the Royal College of Music.

A new production of Humperdinck's charming fairy-tale opera is always to be welcomed, particularly when performed with such enthusiasm by the students of the Royal College of Music.

A delicious evening which showed off its young talent to best advantage and made us want more Offenbach.

Two contemporary operas give us darkness and death in riveting, inexorable performances. 

Timothy Edlin was a superb ass, first among six equals, in Liam Steel's production. 

The Royal College of Music's first opera of the season, The Cunning Little Vixen has some excellent singing and first-class playing from the student orchestra.

Stephen Unwin's straight direction and some talented young singers from the Royal Academy of Music Opera school made these two works a real treat. 

The Royal College of Music, Paris Opera Academy and Versailles Baroque Music Centre take on the ambitious task of bringing Rameau opéra-ballet to a London audience.

An impressive display of singing technique isn't enough to make RCM's Ariodante connect with hearts and minds.

An energetic performance of Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus, showcased both the work and some very fine young singers.

Fine orchestral and singing performances in ETO's Pelléas et Mélisande aren't enough to overcome some of the work's difficulties.

The laughs keep on coming in Liam Steel's glorious 1950s Albert Herring in an English village where pretensions rise as morals decay, while Nick Pritchard shines as our modest eponymous hero.

J.C. Bach's opera Adriano in Siria, set to a popular libretto by Metastasio, was first performed in London in January 1765 when the nine-year-old Mozart was in town.

A reconstruction of a long-lost opera by Handel gives some exciting young singers the chance to shine at the London Handel Festival, even if the plot might be better back in the mists of obscurity. 

Oliver Rudland's new opera based on Golding's novel Pincher Martin, receives its première at the Royal College of Music.

It may not be perfect, but this rare chance to see Rossini's La gazzetta should not be missed, in a glitteringly elaborate production with a talented young cast, great choreography and even a pantomime camel...

Five short, exciting new works created in response to images by William Hogarth, showcasing a plethora of upcoming talent which already has lots to say about love, life, unkind critics and rave culture.

Despite a disappointingly static production, the cast shine in the Royal College of Music's producion of Handel's rarity Arianna in Creta.

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.

“... and as Venice in many things surpasses all places else where I have been, so are these Operas the most excellent of all its glorious Vanities.” So wrote the entranced English traveller Richard Bargrave in 1655. These days, however, Venice travels to England in the form of the English Touring Opera’s 2013 autumn season production.

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.

Imeneo (1740), Handel’s penultimate opera, is atypical on several fronts. It’s relatively short by Handel’s standards (three acts, under two hours of music); the plot is thin, but not as absurd or complicated as those of some of his other operas (there are no disguises, for example); the title role is composed for a bass; and the opera has a chorus which participates in the plot, rather than just

“Bring it on”. This was the response of Nicholas Sears, Head of Vocal Studies at the Royal College of Music, when Iain Burnside sketched out his plan for a music theatre event that would almost certainly cross boundaries of taste.

Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite is a film score originally composed in 1938. It’s a piece with many contrasts, yet the recurring melodies and catchy rhythms make it a joy to hear. The first movement was introduced by Laura Gilroy on cornet, hidden in the wings of the concert hall, after which the percussion and flutes took over.

“I apologise to those who anticipated togas, or 17th-century Venice”, writes James Conway in the programme notes to his production of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea, currently running at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre in London.

Keeping up their tradition of mixing contemporary repertoire and new commissions with early music, Fretwork presented an eclectic mix of Purcell Fantasias and a variety of modern works written or arranged for viol consort and soprano in tonight’s concert, part of the RCM’s annual viol festival.

New music sounds all the newer when played by new performers, and so the Royal College of Music’s New Perspectives concert was refreshing to say the least, with a programme played by the College’s own ensemble featuring two world premières and two more pretty recent works.

The opening theme of Bruckner’s Symphony no. 8 is announced in the depths of the orchestra; with the precise rhythm of the main theme of the first movement of Beethoven’s 9th and something of the character of the Siegfried motive from Götterdämmerung, it contains energy and heroic aspiration, but also a harmonic instability that gives it a searching and unsettled quality.

Contemporary music ensembles can be rather nebulous entities, their repertoire often necessitating complete line-up changes between pieces and the "whole" of the ensemble rarely being needed at the same time.

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).

Upon his death in 2009, Merce Cunningham left behind a huge footprint in the contemporary dance world. A stalwart of the American scene with a career spanning over 70 years, he created in excess of 150 original works and facilitated more than 800 improvised events.

When one sets off to the opera to attend what is usually called a ‘double bill’, one will, most of the time, expect to see two operas clearly contrasting in character. More unusual is to find two extremely different works, hardly sharing anything between themselves, presented in a reading that digs deep for any possible echoes.

The Royal College of Music’s International Opera School has long been a training ground for some of the world’s most famous opera stars.

This week, the annual London Handel Festival, now in its 34th year, opened with a new production of his opera Rodelinda.

If anyone tells you that all opera is highbrow, Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld provides you with a perfect example of the opposite. It's coarse, raunchy, fast, fun, and continually pokes fun at the conventions of grand opera.