Intérprete: Elisabeth Meister

The most Scottish of operas, Verdi's Macbeth, makes big demands on its soloists and is packed with choruses, so it was interesting to see how Scottish Opera's production managed with only seven singers and a chamber orchestra.

Among the brilliant programming of The Rest is Noise festival in London, there was one concert this year that stood above all the others for me: the European première of Shostakovich’s opera prologue Orango. First discovered in an archive in 2004 by scholar Olga Digonskaya, Orango was never finished by Shostakovich, and indeed only a piano score remained.

Revivals of 21st century operas on the stages of major houses are rarer than hens' teeth, so the Royal Opera were making a strong statement when they announced the revival of Harrison Birtwistle's 2008 The Minotaur, with the original director and much of the original cast.

Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is an odd piece. Despite having a rich recorded legacy, it is not a piece that one encounters often in the concert hall. The technical challenges of this music are up there with virtually any other piece of combined music for choir and orchestra.

As I walked to this concert by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir, I wondered what might have changed in Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Beethoven in the two decades since he first recorded these symphonies.

Monumental in scale and scope, Götterdämmerung is a work to which it is hard to be indifferent. For many, the idea of an evening of fantasy opera lasting nearly seven hours is unimaginable, so uncongenial is the subject material and so great the attention span demanded.