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Charles Edwards' ambitious production is well served by a strong cast as Grange Park Opera opens its season in the Theatre in the Woods. 

Ivor Bolton and Kit Hesketh-Harvey deliver a brilliant political thriller and anti-Putin polemic – at least for its first half.

Grange Park Opera's revival of its 2015 production of Puccini's La bohème hits some high notes with a very contemporary feel and some excellent singing from its leading ladies.

A spirited account of Verdi's early opera in its first professional UK staging, nowhere near as “ugly” as Verdi would have had us believe. 

Olena Tokar's assured coloratura made an immediate success of the waltz with her convincingly adolescent appearance, rhythmic verve and stylish phrasing.

A fascinating modern production of Cherubini's masterpiece Medea. Lise Davidsen is especially noteworthy while the rest of the cast give luminous performances. 

A searing, edge-of-your-seat spinetingler from Elijah Moshinsky makes the strongest possible case for Verdi's first Macbeth, ideally suited to the proportions of Buxton's beautiful Opera House.

Trophy room glass display cases and glassy-eyed stuffed animals are the setting for a distinctive take on Wagner's epic music drama. 

Stephen Barlow makes the case for Beethoven's earlier version of Fidelio, but doesn't quite manage to convince.

Using Stephen Medcalf’s 2008 staging, this opening night of love and loneliness was a feast for the eyes, a musical triumph and a dramatic tour-de-force that tugged at the heart strings.

This year’s Wexford Festival opened with Frederick Delius’ Koanga – a tricky piece to get right, but director Michael Gielata largely succeeded.

Gustave Charpentier's Louise, revived and in excellent form at the Buxton Festival.

Amateur gangsters, but a nicely sung, if rather staid Lucia di Lammermoor at Buxton, worth seeing for its excellent mad scene.

 Despite a stellar Mimì, a disappointing La bohème at Grange Park Opera.

The charm-ometer was cranked firmly to ‘high’ yesterday evening for the opening opera of this year’s Buxton Festival with a performance of The Jacobin, an opera close to Dvořák’s heart. 

Bringing Peter Grimes to Grange Park a year after the Britten centenary is an enormous challenge. With ‘Grimes on the Beach’ still fresh in the memory, the task of recreating the Suffolk coast in Hampshire’s idyllic countryside might have seemed a step too far. 

A double bill of rare operas: it’s like Christmas has come early in London. The Guildhall School are pairing Debussy’s The Prodigal Son with Donizetti’s sparkling court comedy Francesca di Foix.

There can be little doubt that two principal draws of the Buxton Festival are the annual opportunity to experience little-known and sometimes totally unheard-of repertoire and composers, and forgotten repertoire by familiar composers; the co-operation of such a festival committee, patrons and backers that supports the production of rare works is a gift to any artistic director – especially one as

When you think chic, black-tie country house opera, you probably don’t also think sixteen barefoot nuns being executed. Grange Park Opera’s fusion of these two contrasting ideas, however, has a lot going for it: their production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites combines its minimal but effective staging with some impressive singing.

As I left Holland Park after last night’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, I found myself wondering what they’d put in the orchestra’s cups of tea at the interval. Or, perhaps, what was it that conductor Stuart Stratford said to them.

Of all the mischievous dramatic reversals that line Rigoletto’s plot – the hunchbacked jester tricked into abducting his own daughter, the daughter tricked into loving the brainless Duke (posing as a penniless student), and the terrifying reunion of father and daughter in a scene of murder – is not the most breathtaking, after all, the fact that the opera begins with a convincing display of the de

Opera school productions are designed to provide experience for their students and showcase their talents to an audience sprinkled with casting directors. Clearly, the Guildhall School have decided to extract maximum value from their current production by staging not one opera but three, with different casts and even different orchestral musicians.

Buxton, a small spa town in Derbyshire, has been home to one of the most imaginative and important festivals in Britain for over thirty years.

Die Zauberflöte is probably the greatest singspiel ever composed (only Mozart's own Die Entführung aus dem Serail can compete for beauty), but it is rather difficult to stage because of its highly complicated story and abstruse and rather ambiguous masonic symbolism. But the music sweeps all before it with its extraordinary beauty, quality and variety.

Britten’s only Shakespeare opera was a last-minute commission to celebrate the opening of the refurbished Jubilee Hall at the 1960 Aldeburgh Festival. Despite the narrow timescale, Britten and his collaborator and partner Peter Pears notoriously strove to adhere to the sixteen-century dramatic text as closely as possible. Only a handful of Shakespeare’s original lines were substantially modified.

History has cast a complex light on Wagner’s music and on Wagner the man. But Tristan & Isolde (Wagner’s enormous vision of erotic love) is an opera that can still resonate today. Nietzsche referred to its “dangerous fascinations”, “spine-tingling and blissful infinity“ and “voluptuousness”. This was Grange Park Opera’s first foray into Wagnerian opera.

The eponymous heroine of Dvořák’s Rusalka is a water-sprite from the woods and lakes of Middle European fairy-tale, very much the territory familiar to ballet lovers in Giselle and Swan Lake.

Gaetano Donizetti's commedia dell'arte-inspired Don Pasquale is one of the favourites in the opera buffa repertoire. At its ending, the assembled company boisterously enjoin us to remember that when an elderly man marries a much younger woman, no good can result.Apparently, the same is not true of an elderly conductor joining a much younger orchestra.

In 1790s France, a young noblewoman, Blanche de La Force, decides to enter a Carmelite convent. As the increasingly paranoid revolutionaries close in, Blanche, her family and the nuns hold a series of discussions on their circumstances, the danger, their faith and, ultimately, their martyrdom.

Back in the 1950s and 60s, Vincenzo Bellini's Norma was one of the standards of the repertoire, putting in regular appearances at the world's top opera houses. It was a staple role for Maria Callas, who performed the opera 89 times.