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Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice enjoys its world premiere at LA Opera. 

Alessandro Talevi production for Festival O has sight gags and vaudeville tricks aplenty and features splendid voices in a fine cast. 

It is a thing of wonder that Roberto Devereux is one of Donizetti’s lesser known works. Whether on account of its challenging soprano part, or its fussy Tudor setting, it is rarely performed, but contains some of the composer’s most beautiful – and indeed memorable – arias and duets.

Hats off to Andreas Homoki, Artistic Director at the Zurich Opera House, for staging a musical around “the chill of ghostly shadows”.

The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic under the baton of conductor Vasily Petrenko uncovers the magic of Rimsky-Korsakov’s exotic score. 

Santa Fe Opera's colorful and beautifully sung The Golden Cockerel makes a case for more Rimsky-Korsakov opera in the repertoire.

Complete performances of Semiramide are as rare as hen's teeth. Opera Rara came close in a terrific concert performance in the Hanging Gardens of Kensington.

Annilese Miskimmon's production of I puritani mixes Royalists with Loyalists - but is musically successful under Carlo Rizzi's baton.

A thrilling evening at Poole’s Lighthouse with the BSO and Chorus plus a quartet of superb soloists, conducted by Kirill Karabits in an unforgettable performance of Verdi’s Requiem. 

Aleksandra Kurzak delivers a top drawer performance as Fiorilla, leading a star-studded cast as Evelino Pidò gives us a lesson in how to conduct Rossini in the latest revival of Il turco in Italia.

A colour-coded Mosè in Egitto uses the paintings of Marc Chagall to inspire the costumes for the Jews and the Egyptians in this production of a Rossinian rarity.

Welsh National Opera's new production of Rossini's William Tell shows off orchestra and chorus to their full under Carlo Rizzi's baton

Verdi’s Otello opens with a fierce storm raging over Cyprus. In Rossini’s version, composed 71 years earlier in 1816, the composer eschewed the Cypriot setting entirely and the storm doesn’t take place until Act III, although last night a mighty crack of thunder resounded over the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées as the audience filed into the opera house. 

Last night’s opening of Christopher Alden’s allusive, conceptual Rigoletto for ENO, a co-production with Canadian Opera Company, was a notable event for London opera. Musically, ENO have been on top of their game this season and last night was no exception.

RSNO concerts begin, for me and around 100 others, with the pre-concert talk. I'm especially glad of these when new to a work, such as Mendelssohn’s 1846 Elijah. A talk by those who have prepared the music for us adds something to even the most extensive “presearch”. Sir Andrew Davis, in conversation with RSNO principal trombonist Dávur Juul Magnussen, came across as extremely witty and erudite.

Mozart wrote the opera seria Mitridate at the age of fifteen. The Bayerische Staatsoper’s clever and strangely beautiful production positions it as the work of a child, full of rebellious teenagers and projected scenery seemingly drawn from a primary school art class.

Sir, Madam, do you like your opera quirky? A singing mechanical doll? A giant shaving mirror? The Evil Eye itself in a piano? Then welcome to the inebriated, fantastical, phantasmagorical world of E.T.A. Hoffmann, brought to you by Mr. Richard Jones with a delightful musical accompaniment by M. Jacques Offenbach.

Read our review of Mary Zimmerman's production of Rossini­'s Armida in its 2010 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.

Au sein d'un week-end consacré à Berlioz, le monumental Te Deum étourdit les auditeurs de la Philharmonie, écrasant la création du Concerto pour piano n° 2 de Jarrell par Chamayou.

Se representa en el Teatro Real El gallo de oro, un trabajo insólitamente crítico para su época, en una produccion que, gracias a la conjunción de elementos, destila magia, calidad artística y un toque ácido de presente.

Cette version concert n’empêche pas les chanteurs de se livrer à une véritable interprétation de leur personnage sous la houlette nette et nerveuse de Jean-Christophe Spinosi. 

Diese Oper ist mehr Hausmannskost als Haute cuisine, richtig zubereitet aber trotzdem schmackhaft.