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Written half a century before the verismo movement, Donizetti paints a true-to-life portrait of a besieged people which is genuinely touching. James Conway's straightforward production features some notable individual singers and an excellent performance by the chorus.

Few composers deal in genial wit better than Joseph Haydn, so it was baffling that his opera buffa Il mondo della luna left me so grumpy in this English Touring Opera production. 

When compared to the operas of Handel, Vivaldi’s operas are still relative rarities either on stage or in concert. There have been a handful of performances in UK in the last five years...

Five hours with five counter tenors: a virtuoso stand-off which impresses, even astounds, but ultimately exhausts even the most dedicated audience by its refusal to cut a single note of what becomes a very long, florid opera by Jommelli. 

Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival is continuing this season with programming focusing on the second half of the 20th century. Tonight’s music was a part of the festival’s Britten centenary celebrations, adding in works by Copland and Shostakovich.

Audiences have come to look forward to the annual co-production between Scottish Opera and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where student opera singers, orchestra players and backstage crew get a chance to partner up with their professionals across the other side of Glasgow’s Hope Street.

While on a wildlife safari holiday in the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana, Alexander McCall Smith asked his guides to take him across a river to where two primatologists were researching baboon behaviour. Baboons are matriarchal and uniquely in common with humans, high status is inherited.