Netia Jones' new production taps into Britten's silvery underworld in a staging dominated by video wizardry which is hypnotically beautiful, but comes at a price.
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.
The Devil Inside, a chilling new opera by Stuart Macrae with libretto by Louise Welsh, is a fairy tale for grown-ups. Who will be the last owner of the devilish bottle and the curse of eternal damnation?
Justina Gringyte is a fabulous Carmen in Scottish Opera's dark take on this most tuneful of operas. Large choruses, including children with cigarettes, and a strong supporting cast make this an enjoyable show.
Donizetti’s Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo hasn’t strayed onto UK shores for decades, but is given a spirited performance by English Touring Opera.
Opera North's static production of Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea directed by Tim Albery takes place in a murderous psychopath’s private cellar.
The impressively well-drilled children’s chorus dominates this glittering production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the second component of Opera North’s Festival of Britten. 20 young performers in white, black wings on their fairy shoulders, wind solemnly in and out of the action, assemble in rows, perform versions of callisthenics exercises, and sing beautifully.
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.
Franz Lehár’s favourite haunt was Vienna’s Café Sperl, and with the famous Theater an der Wien around the corner, Café Sperl became the meeting place for the operetta crowd around the turn of the 20th century. The Theater an der Wien was the site of the world première of Lehár’s tenth stage work, The Merry Widow, which met its enthusiastic public on 30 December 1905.
The Barber of Seville and Eugene Onegin, the two operas being toured by English Touring Opera this season, share two things: they are both highly melodic stalwarts of the repertoire, and their plots both revolve around the writing of love letters.
Scottish Opera and Northern Ireland Opera's new version of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld has been touring Scotalnd and Northern Ireland: it's now arrived in London for a short run at the Young Vic in London, in its 150-seater Maria hall alongside the main theatre.
The operas of Mieczyslaw Weinberg are being pulled out of obscurity. Until the 2010 Bregenz Festival, when director David Pountney placed the composer at the centre of the three-day event and staged an ambitious production of the The Passenger, none of his seven operas had ever been heard outside of Russia.
What clever scheduling by Opera North. In the centre of Leeds the snow is turning grey and slushy, the temperature is ridiculously low and it's dark before mid-afternoon, but inside The Grand Theatre it's a different story- a story which seems specifically designed to lift the winter blues.
