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The Hungarian State Opera presents a new modern production of Don Carlo by a director who depicts the historical cruelty as very much present in our world today.

A simple, noble and dramatic escape from the present day as the company dances Michael Messerer’s updated (slightly shortened) version of the Vainonen classic.

Powerful and evocative imagery, both literal and implied, lingered on beyond the drop of the curtain.

The music, a combination of Italian-sounding melodies, German instrumentation and Hugarian dotted rhythms, was remarkably captivating.

This concert, with a running time of about two hours, was a lovely dip in the Rhine without the usual four-to-five hour Wagnerian full immersion.

The big heart and generous melodies of Ferenc Erkel's fine opera shine through in difficult circumstances in Atilla Vidnyánszky semi-abstract new staging at the Erkel Theatre.

This double cast, nine-day revival of Vadim Milkov's staging of Pique Dame offers a relatively straight reading of Tchaikovsky's opera about the obsessive Pushkin-based character Herman. Embracing the opera's choral and dance passages, spectacle and pageantry are paramount; the drama's surreal and more nuanced dimensions could have been better profiled.

Polish opera director Michał Znaniecki created a new version of Zoltán Kodály’s 1927 The Spinning Room, a short one-act which is basically a collection of 21 Hungarian folksongs that Kodály had selected from the Székely region.

The big man in the fat suit rules the show, briging vigour and joie de vivre to Hungarian State Opera's Falstaff.

Hungarian composer Dohnányi's fourth and last opera is a comic delight, especially in the hands of the team at the Budapest Opera.