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Opera North's Aida, directed by Annabel Arden and conducted by Sir Richard Armstrong in Leeds Town Hall, is a welcome radical interpretation in the spirit of the times. 

Opera North's Salome, conducted by Sir Richard Armstrong at Leeds Town Hall, caught the seductive frenzy of the opera.

Opera North's concert version of Puccini's Turandot in Leeds Town Hall, conducted by Sir Richard Armstrong, is magnificent

Jonathan Miller's production remains a work of brilliance, but poor conducting amongst other things keeps this revival from getting off the ground.

The sheer opulence of Minghella's staging often overwhelms, drenched in colour. Is that enough to really get to the core of the drama though, or is it all surface gloss?

Calixto Bieito  updates the Carmen to the final years of Franco’s dictatorship and in Joan Anton Rechi’s revival, the results are often gritty and fierce, if unlikely to do anything for the Spanish tourist trade.

Willy Decker’s production of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, which originated at La Monnaie in Brussels in 1994 and was revived at London’s Royal Opera House in 2004 and 2011, has now reached Tokyo. The work opened the new season of the New National Theatre Tokyo, the capital’s main opera house, currently celebrating its 15th anniversary.

The glittering white of a luxury cruise liner above, the darkened hell of the concentration camp below. Johan Engels' set for Weinberg's The Passenger, first seen at the Bregenz festival in 2010 and now at the ENO in London, is one of the most striking and effective opera sets I've ever seen, both framing the action and adding colour.

In Janáček's opera The Makropulos Case, the operagoer must accept a single premise of implausible fantasy: from then on, the action flows inexorably and logically to its conclusion. It's a device used by a great deal of fantasy literature, from the low-brow of The Day of the Triffids to the high-brow of Janáček's compatriot Kafka's Metamorphosis.