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Zita Szemere is a wonderfully ebullient Marie, but the new production at the Hungarian State Opera merits a mixed report card.

Top drawer singing and comic acting bring out the comedy in Laurent Pelly's light-hearted production

Robert Longbottom's take on Donizetti's Daughter of the Regiment captures the spirit of bel canto in Washington DC. 

Alek Shrader was in control of his high cs and managed to play comedy while sending out glorious wafting notes of emotion and musicality.  

Donizetti's La Fille du régiment brings much needed joy to the Teatro Real, with Javier Camarena's astonishing voice and Aleksandra Kurzak's unapologetic tomboy mesmerising the audience.

Franco Zeffirelli's Palermo La Fille du régiment wears its 55 years with style and elegance, lifted by outstanding singing from Desirée Rancatore and Celso Albelo.

We all know the story about how an opera is supposed to end, but it turns out it is definitely not over until all the fat, black-leather-jacketed, bearded gentlemen sing, and then ride triumphantly away with you on their Harley-Davidsons... 

For frothy entertainment, Pelly’s Fille is harmless fun, even if it descends into pantomime cliché. Juan Diego Flórez’s Tonio ensures it remains a hot ticket and Patrizia Ciofi’s Marie is a bundle of energy.

Chicks dig the high notes. The enduring popularity of Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment seems to indicate as much. The plot is silly (even by opera’s standards) and much of the music is not as memorable as some of Donizetti’s more popular works.

From time to time, audiences are presented with what I consider to be a rare event, a “dream” performer: one so convincing in his or her role that they become an ideal, establishing a standard to which all following interpretations will inevitably be compared – for example, Jacqueline du Pré’s interpretation of Elgar’s Cello Concerto has become a timeless benchmark.

The nationality of Gaetano Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment is as confused as that of its eponymous heroine. Written by a homesick Italian expatriate for that most Parisian of venues the Opéra-Comique, it both continued Donizetti's Italian colonisation of the Paris opera scene (much bemoaned by Berlioz) and showed him adapting his style to the conventions of French theatre.

Natalie Dessay has been making a real signature role out of Marie, Donizetti's foundling "Daughter of the Regiment" who turns out to be of noble birth (well, partly, wherein lies the tale). We went to Covent Garden last night specially to see her, and she didn't disappoint: her performance was quite out of the ordinary.

Read our review of Laurent Pelly's production of Donizetti­'s La Fille du Régiment in its 2008 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.