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What does opera in the 21st century look and sound like? Streets removed from anything Mozart, Verdi or Wagner would have recognised. But Salvatore Sciarrino is his own man.

Lawrence Cummings conducts Zurich’s Orchestra La Scintilla in Handel’s oratorio-cum-opera, Belshazzar. The music was celestial; the staging was a bombastic mix of excess and vaudeville.

Christian Gerhaher’s experience in a role he knows well rescued an evening of mitigated pleasures.

According to director Sven-Eric Bechtolf,  Don Giovanni’s divine retribution for a life of pure evil and insatiable fornication is just more of the same.

A trip down memory lane sends our man in Aix into raptures as Robert Carsen's production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream comes home to Provence. 

A bearded lady and her taxidermied shark are just two eccentric characters livening up Stravinsky’s 1951 moral fable The Rake’s Progress, though the shark is unique to Jonathan Miller’s revived production. 

A safe performance of Poulenc's extraordinary opera in Washington, lacking in pity and terror.

Zurich's The Turn of the Screw is a masterful staging of the Benjamin Britten's musical narrative of Henry James' ghost story. 

Jonathan Kent claims one of the great difficulties of Mozart-Da Ponte’s 1787 dramma giocoso is ‘the collision of an extraordinary variety of music and mood within it’

Read our review of Nicholas Hytner's production of Verdi­'s Don Carlo in its 2010 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.