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Under Dominic Wheeler’s expert baton the musicians, all youthful if not downright young, give a spectacular account of a harrowing score. 

Puccini's Giselle-inspired opera is given a superb staging by Martin Lloyd-Evans to deliver Opera Holland Park's banger of the season. 

Lloyd-Evans' new production of Mozart's classic might be traditional, but there's no lack of astuteness in his direction of his characters. Problems in the pit hinder an otherwise strong musical performance.

Dominic Wheeler did full justice to Britten’s brilliantly colourful and haunting score right from those first eerie glissandi.

An embarrassingly trite libretto proves unsalvageable, even with a committed cast of singers.

The most moving scene in 20th-century opera went for nothing

A newly-orchestrated version of Jonathan Dove’s chamber opera drew some impressive performances from Heritage Opera in this pared-down adaption of Jane Austen’s third novel.

A tight production from Martin Lloyd-Evans together with a strong cast and loving treatment from conductor Matthew Kofi Waldren made a strong case for more regular performances of this neglected gem.

After a sparkling Act I, energy fades slightly on a sweltering night in London, but Opera Holland Park's Die Fledermaus has a lot going for it.

Martin Lloyd Evans returns to Scottish Opera direct a visually rich and lively Mikado. Richard Suart is a veteran Ko-Ko with no-one safe from his Little List as it changes for every performance.

Bleak and uncompromising in vision and intention, Britten's The Rape of Lucretia gets a suitably dark, discomfiting outing at Guildhall. 

In Opera Holland Park's latest foray into obscure verismo, an excellent orchestral performance and high quality singing fails to translate into a compelling drama.

Opera Holland Park give us a broad span of human joys and tragedies in an excellently staged and acted rendering of Puccini's Il trittico.

Scottish Opera's Il trovatore has a uniformly strong cast and shorus who sing finely, conducted by Tobias Ringwood producing spectacular sounds from the orchestra.  A wonderful end to the season. 

Richard Ayres's Peter Pan, in a new WNO production, leaves J.M. Barrie's story dangling. 

In this double bill, we get a violently enthusiastic little farce from Donizetti which, though fiery, is definitely not his best work; but next, we are treated to the revival of a brilliant, beautiful one-act opera by Malcolm Arnold. 

Martin Lloyd-Evan's highly sensitive production features a show-stealing performance by Richard Burkhard but is marred by problems of orchestral balance.

The future of opera is in good hands, if Tuesday night’s opening of Jonathan Dove's The Adventures of Pinocchio at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama is any indication. 

The Secret Marriage has been a hit from its earliest days. At its 1792 première in Vienna, King Leopold II was so delighted by the performance that he ordered the whole company to repair to his mansion, be treated to a magnificent dinner, “and then play the entire opera through again, immediately”.

Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari is a bit of a strange fish: a recluse, a self-described mystic, and proud enough of his hybrid German-Italian identity that he appended his mother’s maiden name to his own at the age of nineteen.

To end the 2012/13 season, Scottish Opera has teamed up with the D’Oyly Carte Company to create a crisp new production of The Pirates of Penzance, which heads off to England and Wales after touring Scotland.

Despite a relatively easy-to-follow storyline, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro is an opera that is hard to pull off entirely successfully. Musically, it requires enormous vigour from both cast and orchestra; dramatically, this opera buffa demands strong acting skills in order to eke out its moments of farce.

After their Mascagni debut last year, with L’amico Fritz (the composer’s first post-Cavalleria opera), Opera Holland Park have set out to uncover more music from the so-called ‘one-hit-wonder’ – still known to most for his smash verismo opera alone.

Britten’s only Shakespeare opera was a last-minute commission to celebrate the opening of the refurbished Jubilee Hall at the 1960 Aldeburgh Festival. Despite the narrow timescale, Britten and his collaborator and partner Peter Pears notoriously strove to adhere to the sixteen-century dramatic text as closely as possible. Only a handful of Shakespeare’s original lines were substantially modified.

Alfredo Catalani's La Wally is the last of three rarely performed Italian operas from the late 19th century verismo period to feature in Opera Holland Park's 2011 season. Catalani belongs to group of composers whose place in the modern repertoire suffers from the problem of "not being Puccini," the more poignantly since he was born in Puccini's home town of Lucca.

Donizetti’s one act opera, Rita, composed in 1841 formed the first half of last night’s double bill at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. The second half comprised another late work, Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, composed in 1891 to a libretto by Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modest. Rita turns out to be far more entertaining than the plot outline promises and deserves to be more widely seen.