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American singers Clay Hilley and Sara Jakubiak offered performances of distinction in two fiendishly difficult roles.

Kevin Puts effectively shapes the time-traveling structure with distinctive sound worlds as thirty dramatic vignettes unfold across a little more than an hour and a half.

During the opening night of Anna Nicole at BAM, I found myself experiencing a case of déjà vu. New York City Opera was electrifying the Howard Gilman Opera House with a work by a living composer featuring the salacious story of a female protagonist whose life was splashed across tabloids, and at one point even featuring an act of fellatio with the disjointed music carrying on in the background.

Manon was not only central to Jules Massenet’s claim to international celebrity after its creation in 1884, it remains at the heart of the operatic repertoire and Massenet’s popularity today. Manon returned to the stage of L’Opéra de Montréal on 18 May after a lengthy absence to close the company’s 2012/13 season.

Henri Bergson famously defined comedy as “something mechanical encrusted on the living”. One suspects that Jacques Offenbach would have been a fan of this definition, and that Christopher Alden most certainly is.

In an opera of such popularity as Carmen by Georges Bizet, it wouldn’t be easy to please an audience likely to be inured to a variety of performances of arias such as Habanera and The Toreador’s Song. Yet Opera Australia made a thoughtfully constructed and well vindicated attempt.