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Two individual works worth seeking out with outstanding performances in each.

Kate Lindsey and Heidi Stober weave vocal magic in the latest Covent Garden revival of Humperdinck's box of delights. 

Singing performances are excellent, the staging is well crafted and Stravinsky's eclectic score entertains from start to finish. But it's an evening's opera that doesn't touch the soul.

A forgettable Hansel and Gretel is the worst offence of Antony McDonald’s leaden staging which returns to Covent Garden. 

Incest, family secrets, murder… this is a fiercely compelling evening of dance, drama and song.

English National Ballet tours its outgoing artistic director's revision of Petipa's Raymonda, but it's Glazunov who proves the real winner. 

Lisette Oropesa leads strong vocal performances in Handel's madcap tale of love and sorcery. Richard Jones' production is visually all over the place, but in a good way.

Richard Jones' setting is superb in its bare minimalism, but he pays great attention to all the psychological nuances in Janáček's opera. 

Petipa's classical choreography and Glazunov's ravishing score fuse with a reimagined narrative and bold choreographic additions to create a new Raymonda for the 21st century.

Christine Rice gives an astonishingly performance in an evening of four powerful chamber pieces.

Barry goes for out-weirding Carroll at a fast and furious pace. There's plenty of fun and it's beautifully staged – but is that enough?

Amanda Majeski is magnificent in the title role; Ed Gardner shows total master of Janáček's music. But that's not enough to rescue a poorly thought out Richard Jones production.

Designer/director Antony McDonald treads a perfectly weighted path between light and dark of the fairytale; conductor Sebastian Weigle cooks up a Wagnerian storm; Michaela Schuster steals the show. A treat.

Diego Fasolis leads a period performance of Mozart’s early masterpiece with a strong cast and a clever production.

A spirited and seamless production of Strauss’s Ariadne is aided by some excellent singing and playing at London’s premier summer opera festival.

Oper Frankfurt's revival of Richard Jones's production of Billy Budd with a homegrown cast is a devastating combination of powerful music and searing drama.

Antony McDonald’s take on Ariadne auf Naxos, a co-production from Scottish Opera and Opera Holland Park, sparkles with wit. 

Top accolades go to soprano Mary Plazas, whose Duchess was at once despicable for her sense of entitlement and her racist and anti-Semitic views, and heartbreakingly vulnerable with her realisation at the end that "the only people who were ever good to me were paid for it".

At La Scala, Milan a disappointing tribute to Giorgio Strehler's historic staging of The Marriage of Figaro by young English director Frederic Wake-Walker. 

Too many paparazzi and not enough Puccini in Robert Carsen’s Manon Lescaut in Vienna.

Anthony McDonald’s Rusalka looks and sounds wonderful in a traditionally told production, with Anne Sophie Duprels returning to the role.

La finta giardiniera isn't one of Mozart's greatest operas. But this is about as good a production of it as I can imagine and makes for a deliciously light-hearted evening. 

Welsh National Opera’s contribution to the Wagner bicentenary is in the form of a summer season entitled Wagner Dream, consisting of Jonathan Harvey’s opera of the same name, a run of Madam Butterfly, and Antony McDonald’s new production of Lohengrin. Lothar Koenigs conducted an excellent performance of Wagner’s romantic opera at a packed Wales Millennium Centre.

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.

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.

Associant deux œuvres majeures de Ravel (le ballet Ma mère l’Oye et la fantaisie lyrique L’Enfant et les sortilèges), cette production est un spectacle de féerie dans lequel s'illustrent les jeunes talents de l'Opéra.

Andreas Homoki inszeniert Puccinis Oper auf einem riesigen Stück Papier. Was noch einem harten Stück Regietheater klingt, entpuppt sich als packendes Kammerspiel, das ganz auf seine Protagonistin zugespitzt ist.

Bei der Wiederaufnahme von Giacomo Puccinis Tränengarant ist es in einer halbgaren Inszenierung Asmik Grigorian, die für große Opernmomente sorgt.

Impression mitigée au sortir de ce long voyage musical de près de quatre heures.