Intérprete: Alfie Boe

Jonathan Miller's much-loved production of The Mikado for English National Opera is now 25 years old and well remembered. But not, I confess by me. My last experience of Gilbert and Sullivan was on the other side of the curtain, as a sister, cousin or aunt in a school production of HMS Pinafore, an experience sufficiently scarring that I resolved never to go to a G&S opera again.

Gounod's Roméo et Juliette isn't exactly a rarity, but it is no longer one of the stalwarts of the opera repertoire, a position which it certainly occupied during the Victorian era (there were 102 performances at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris in the first year of its life, followed by 291 performances at the Opéra-Comique in the next twenty).

Bizet's The Pearl Fishers contains one of opera's best known scenes, the "friendship duet" between the fishermen Zurga and Nadir. The opera's proponents, of which Hector Berlioz was one, praise it for a string of wonderful musical numbers; its critics deride it as a "one aria opera" (or, in the case of the critics at its première in 1863, as "sub Wagner").