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Giacomo Sagripanti’s live wire dynamics and keenly judged tempo choices keep this revival of Verdi's Il trovatore buoyant at Covent Garden. 

Four superstars deliver dramatic moments in this revival of Sir David McVicar’s Goya-inspired staging of Verdi’s melodrama. 

Adele Thomas’ Royal Opera staging channels the Marx Brothers in playing it for laughs, but the musical compensations are many under Sir Antonio Pappano.

All you need to stage Trovatore, according to Enrico Caruso, are “the four greatest singers in the world”. The Verdi Festival may have found the four loudest...

Gianandrea Noseda takes his post as general music director at the Opernhaus Zurich leading a great cast in Adele Thomas' successful new production. 

Francisco Negrín gives his singers little help in a dark, boxy new staging, put together at frantic, last minute speed. 

Rising mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis offers a gorgeously sung and grippingly acted portrait of Verdi's gypsy. 

In a reduced concert performance of Il trovatore the drama unfolds with the force of music alone.

Female voices dominate in the vocal cast: Rachel Willis-Sørensen debuts as Leonora and charms the audience; Anna Maria Chiuri has the temperament and rich vocality requested by the role of the gypsy.

When they asked Wilson to stage an opera by Verdi, the Texan director replied "I'll never do it!". Now he is at his fourth Verdi's production.

In a dated production by Hans Neuenfels, conductor Giacomo Sagripanti leads a musically successful Trovatore, where Angela Meade and Anita Rachvelishvili show their vocal brilliance.

Towering above all the other meritorious singers in this performance, was the phenomenal Georgian mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili 

Vienna stages an all-star new production of Verdi's classic, with sublime singing in Daniele Abbado's Spanish Civil War setting.

An outstanding Azucena and solid vocal and orchestral performances more than make up for David Bösch's unappealing staging.

The Marx Brothers famously sent up Verdi's middle period masterpiece in A Night at the Opera and if Bösch doesn't exactly send up Trovatore's corrosive cocktail of infanticide, jealousy and vengeance, he undermines it with his staging.

Francesco Meli asserts his credentials as one of the top tenors singing Manrico; David Bösch's staging lacks attention to detail.

Inadequate production and mixed performances characterize the Hungarian State Opera's new Trovatore.

A spirited performance of Verdi's beloved work highlighted the virtues of opera in concert.

Despite the sombre staging, it’s the vocal fire that blazes in this impressive Trovatore in Paris.

At the Dutch National Opera, director Àlex Ollé from La Fura dels Baus stages a dark and monochromatic Trovatore, in which the four stars shine.

David McVicar's six-year old production of Il trovatore returns to the Met with a starry cast:a model of clarity and mood compared with the Met’s previous staging.

Scottish Opera's Il trovatore has a uniformly strong cast and shorus who sing finely, conducted by Tobias Ringwood producing spectacular sounds from the orchestra.  A wonderful end to the season. 

Nothing will make the plot of Il trovatore less ridiculous. But a director who embraces that ridiculousness, plus stellar playing and singing, make for a great show.

Director Michal Znaniecki sets the action of Verdi's popular Il trovatore in an indeterminate 20th century wartime, undecidedly trying to mix up visual suggestions and primeval anguish

The Il trovatore on offer at the Lyric this month would make a fine CD, its vocal strengths to be found equally among the leading foursome, but its weaknesses are visual and dramaturgical, and these are plenty too.

First presented in Perth in 2002, West Australian Opera’s Il trovatore (a co-production with Opera Queensland and State Opera of South Australia) is dedicated to the memory of director Elke Neidhardt, and here the stage becomes hers.

Since 2013 marks a Verdi anniversary, the Viennese have been treated to two new productions of Il trovatore: Philipp Stölzl’s pacey, offbeat deconstruction that will open in Berlin next week, and this Volksoper co-production with the Theater Bonn where the curtain goes down after every scene.

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.

Simultaneously one of the most loved and most mocked operas in the canon, Il trovatore has some of Verdi’s catchiest melodies set to one of his silliest plots. Against the backdrop of a 15th-century Spanish war, a cast of nobles, gypsies, nuns and soldiers enact a drama which hinges on that hoariest of dramatic clichés: children swapped at birth.

What do you get when you have a woman being burnt on the stake and her daughter tosses a baby – the wrong baby – on the pyre? The correct answer is Giuseppe Verdi’s incredible melodrama Il Trovatore.The Canadian Opera Company’s production (borrowed from Opéra de Marseille) eschews melodramatic displays but does provide some thrills.

Chamber opera - or, more often, pub opera - seems to be flourishing in London at the moment, with half a dozen companies actively putting on reduced productions. The latest of these to take place at my local theatre is Opera London's version of Il Trovatore, somewhat reduced down to two hours and performed with just a piano.

Read our review of David McVicar's production of Verdi's Il Trovatore in its 2011 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.