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Peter Seiffert can still impress as Tristan, but Graham Vick's staging is uncertain and unconvincing. 

As part of the annual Wagner festival in the Hungarian capital, Peter Seiffert and Allison Oakes star as the doomed lovers.

Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden orchestra are let down by sub-optimal singers in Willy Deckers chair-laden production of  Die Walküre. 

Deutsche Oper Berlin's concert performance of Act 1 of Die Walküre was an occasion to savor with Anja Harteros making her role debut as Sieglinde. 

Tim Albery's 2010 production of Tannhäuser, receiving its first revival at Covent Garden, begins with a stylish opening 20 minutes, but thereafter things become rather bland. 

A strong cast headed by Peter Seiffert perform in this visually appealing Tannhäuser at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, where Markus Brück excels as Wolfram and Petra Maria Schnitzer takes on the role of the temptress Venus and the saintly Elisabeth.

Tristan und Isolde is notoriously difficult to bring off in the theatre, but under Daniel Barenboim's direction, Waltraud Meier, Peter Seiffert and an outstanding cast give a profoundly moving performance of Harry Kupfer's production at the Berlin Staatsoper.

A thoughtful pairing of Schoenberg's Friede auf Erden and Beethoven's Ninth fails to catch fire.

Daniel Harding and the London Symphony Orchestra again paired Schubert with a late Romantic, this time Richard Wagner, and the second act of Tristan und Isolde. The orchestra were on a form it would be hard to match.

When most of us feel like we’re getting a little stale with a piece of work we’re doing – when the thoughts, words or ideas are drying up – we stop for a coffee, stretch our legs, or do a bit of internet browsing. When Richard Wagner realised inspiration was running low for Siegfried, he decided to have a break from it too.

Think of all the adjectives typically used to report on the best of female Wagner singing; add lyrical phrasing and imagine the absence of any shrillness, and you have come as close as possible to a description of the perfection that Nina Stemme achieved in her first Isolde for the Wiener Staatsoper.

Otello is usually considered to be Verdi’s most mature opera. It was one of the last ones he wrote, the result of a plot by his publisher Riccordi and the conductor Franco Faccio to draw him out of early retirement. The result is a work which combines all the aspects of Verdi’s earlier operatic style with Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk.

Beethoven took over nine years to write and edit Fidelio, his only opera. It tells the story of Leonore, whose husband Florestan is being illegally held in prison. She disguises herself as a man, Fidelio, and gets a job in the prison in an attempt to save him.

Die Neuinszenierung Wagners Musikdrama steht in Patrick Kinmonths Inszenierung ganz im Zeichen der Philosophie Schopenhauers.

Mit Ariadne auf Naxos von Richard Strauss zeigt die Bayerische Staatsoper, dass auch eine Wiederaufnahme für musikalische Höhepunkte sorgen kann.