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Beautifully prepared singing and playing brings out the tender side to Berg's modernist classic as part of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival. 

A revelatory orchestral performance and a cast led by Andreas Schager, Christopher Maltman and Elisabeth Strid make this a Siegfried for the record books.

Katie Mitchell wheels out her tired old tropes in The Makropulos Case, redeemed by its musical performances. 

Robert Carsen's new production of Janáček’s The Excursions of Mr Brouček for the Staatsoper Unter den Linden scores a well-deserved success thanks to a stellar – or rather, lunar – conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.

Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging of Rusalka in Naples has a starkly modern visual style which occasionally dilutes the story’s emotional impact.

English National Opera brings back Simon McBurney's theatre of wonders for this Mozart classic. 

A revival low on dramatic power and emotional temperature, despite a fine Royal Opera debut by conductor Karen Kamensek. 

Andris Nelsons brings his Shostakovich project to a close in Boston with an incandescent performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. 

Maxim Emelyanychev, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Chorus and a luxury cast of soloists enchant in a concert performance of The Magic Flute at the Edinburgh International Festival.

Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO give an orchestral performance to remember, with a fine singing cast, but Simon McBurney's staging dials the bleakness to maximum too early.

A potent rendering of Alban Berg's tale of the traumatised and impoverished war veteran.

A long stellar night of supremely assured singing and playing in Wagner's Siegfried, with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle on top form.

Janáček’s satirical opera The Excursions of Mr Brouček may not be among his greatest dramatic works, yet it earns its place in the limelight for its musical, visual and dramatic wit at Grange Park Opera.

Director Claus Guth's new production for the Staatsoper Berlin is a bit of a mixed bag but the evening succeeds more on its musical merits, with a splendid ensemble of singers and orchestra conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.

Poised performances of Fauré and Mozart from Stephanie Childress and the RLPO and expressive Britten with tenor Peter Hoare.

Messrs Rattle and Sellars bewitch the Barbican audience with a sumptuous rendition of Janáček's magnum opus. 

Franz Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten (The Branded One) is an unsettling work given the storyline’s background of abduction and clandestine sexual abuse. Calixto Bieito, as expected, eschews ambiguity regarding what goes on behind the scenes, and casts even the titular cripple Alviano Salvago in a damning light.

George Benjamin and Martin Crimp's second full scale opera is a refinement of the craft showed in Written on Skin – but the lessons are less in love and violince than in power, tension and beauty of the score.

Johan Reuter is gripping in Krzysztof Warlikowski's powerful vision of the universal, timeless horrors of prison, but visual clutter distracts from Janáček’s music.

The Spanish director offers a controversial angle but tones it down to focus on dark psychology rather than spectacle in his staging of Schrecker's hothouse opera.

A taste of the future with Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO.

Problems of orchestral balance cloud Olivia Fuchs's straightforward, compelling staging of Janáček’s tirade against the rigidity and hypocrisy of small town society.

Grange Park Opera scored a direct hit with a fine production of Janáček's masterpiece, led by a superb performances from Natalya Romaniw and Susan Bullock as Jenůfa and the Kostelnička.

John Adams and Peter Sellars' biblical oratorio given a fine concert performance by the Berliner Philharmoniker under departing chief conductor, Sir Simon Rattle.

Simon Rattle leads the LSO and a fine chorus and cast of soloists in Ligeti's masterpiece: surreal, madcap but touching the sublime.

An aesthetically handsome but cold and distant staging mars the long-awaited return of  Eva-Maria Westbroek as Puccini’s heroine at Dutch National Opera.

Wagner's Die Walküre and Tippett's A Child of Our Time both attempt to capture the essence of humanity. Despite making for an unusual pairing, the programme was an effective one.

In Janáček's searing excoriation of small town social mores, superb orchestra, singing and acting make this revival of David Alden's Jenůfa into an unmissable evening of opera.

A new cast arrives for Katie Mitchell's gothic Lucia di Lammermoor – and, despite caveats about the staging, deliver some excellent performances. 

“Prepare to be shocked!” was the warning issued before this new Lucia di Lammermoor from Katie Mitchell at the Royal Opera House. Shocking? Yes, but in a good way. 

At Dutch National Opera, director Lotte de Beer’s reminds us who the Hänsels and Gretels of the 21st century are, juggling between harsh reality and heartening fairy tale in a spectacle that both delights and unsettles.

To celebrate its 50th birthday Dutch National Opera put on a festive tribute to the people that have made it the innovative and much-admired house it is today.

The Chelsea Opera Group give a concert performance of Wagner's early opera Das Liebesverbot conducted by Anthony Negus.

Dmitri Tcherniakov turns Shostakovich's "satirical tragedy" into a riveting piece of theatre, help by an outstanding performance from Patricia Racette and a top class orchestral performance from new ENO Musical Director Mark Wigglesworth.

If “all the world’s a jest”, as Sir John Falstaff claims at the end of Verdi’s final operatic masterpiece, then we need players – and directors – with a sense of frivolity. Robert Carsen truly delivers. 

David Alden’s muddled clichés failed to convince all the time, but Edward Gardner steered us through a thrilling musical account of Tchaikovsky’s terrific opera.

From its stunningly filmic opening to its faux-Golgotha finale, the Royal Opera House’s new production of Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny demands our attention. 

Royal Opera’s first rival of Anna Nicole opens to an enthusiastic student audience. Eva-Maria Westbroek dazzles, but second time round the work seems even more burned by its clumsy libretto.

Matthias Goerne steps in for Thomas Hampson and electrifies James Levine's Wozzeck at the Metropolitan Opera. 

Alan Gilbert’s last few seasons at the New York Philharmonic have featured an opera in June. While previous efforts have featured elaborate staging, this year’s installment, Luigi Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero, was performed in concert. For this particular work, which was written for radio broadcast, this seems only appropriate.

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.

How, I wonder, is it best for an opera company to treat a revival of a well-aired, well-liked, decent but not particularly radical production of a top ten opera? This was what the Royal Opera had to contend with in this season’s revival of David McVicar’s 2003 setting of Die Zauberflöte: many in the audience will have known every note of the opera, and several will have been thoroughly familiar wi

Is it possible for us to feel a shred of sympathy for Lulu, surely one of opera’s most notorious anti-heroines, even when she meets her grizzly demise at the coda of Berg’s eponymous masterwork? I think it speaks volumes about the astonishing quality of soprano Marie Arnet’s performance that my answer to this question after seeing Welsh National Opera’s new production of Lulu is a most definite “n

Those closing bars of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, tottering away into nothingness, is one of the great nexus points in musical history.

The second collaboration between Opera Rara and the BBC Symphony Orchestra brought a starry cast to the Barbican Centre on Sunday evening for a revival of Donizetti’s tragic opera Belisario. Written in 1836, immediately after the triumph of Lucia di Lammermoor, it was an instant success following its première at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice and remained in the repertoire for several decades.

For a Parisian, the accordion is the musical instrument most redolent of memories and dreams. So for Bohuslav Martinů's surrealist opera Julietta, written in Paris and infused with a discombobulating jumble of memories and dreams, Antony McDonald's sets were masterpieces: in each of three acts, the stage is dominated by a giant accordion which is more or less the size of the whole stage.

This was a concert contrasting two opposing faces of man. From the heights of genius, of life-affirming, triumphant joy, to the depths of cruelty, of hopeless, nihilistic despair, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra presented two musical visions of humanity in this first concert in their new series, entitled ‘“The still point of the turning world”: Music that defines an era’.

When Hector Berlioz first read Gérard de Nerval's translation of Goethe's Faust, he was entranced: he could not put the book down and worked it into a suite entitled Eight Scenes from Faust. Nearly twenty years later, he came back to the material and expanded it into a larger work La Damnation de Faust, but he was perhaps uncertain as to exactly what it was he had created.

In case you've somehow missed the hype, Anna Nicole is the Royal Opera's newly commissioned opera about the life of Anna Nicole Smith, a girl from Texas who married an elderly billionnaire, became a model and celebrity sex symbol who received gigantic media exposure, and died of a drug overdose a few months after the death of her son.