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Martin Rajna's energetic conducting and Gabriella Balga's glorious Elisabetta are the bright spots in this flashy but empty house premiere of Donizetti's classic.

Calixto Bieito takes on Prokofiev's Tolstoy epic – and wins in the opera's Hungarian premiere. 

The Master and Margarita is a spectacular extravaganza indeed, streamed from Hungarian State Opera's Eiffel Art Studios.

With a convoluted production and uneven cast, Tamás Pál in the pit and Klára Kolonits as Erzsébet Szilágyi prove to be the highlights of the performance of this Erkel classic.

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.

A warhorse on its own, Kálmán Nádasdy's 79-year-old production works surprisingly well, providing a nice evening's entertainment with a dedicated cast.

Klára Kolonits's marvellous Lucia is the only thing brightening the bleak performance of the Hungarian State Opera's new Lucia di Lammermoor.

This visiting production by Róbert Alföldi set in a psychiatric unit is sensational; thought-provoking, moving and with a very fine cast.

Known for her powerful interpretations of the blockbuster Italian mezzo roles, the great Hungarian diva Ildikó Komlósi dominates the new production of Aida in Budapest.

In a reconstruction of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s production for the world première of Reimann’s soul-pummelling Lear, the staging stands the test of time, but the cast and orchestra leave the biggest impression.

A very good production of Luisa Miller by the Teatro San Carlo, set in Naples itself.