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Does the devil get the best tunes? Nick Shadow steals the show in the Royal Academy's production of The Rake's Progress.

Royal Academy Opera's thoroughly competent Suor Angelica precedes a fabulously entertaining Gianni Schicchi, with a top drawer performance from Haobin Wang in the title role.

Drawing a line of suffering from ancient Rome to Golgotha to the concentration camps, Britten’s blank postcard from Belsen strikes to the heart of humanity. The Rape of Lucretia is brilliantly realised by the Royal Academy of Music.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a Handel opera in pursuit of a happy ending must have a few twists and turns, and Ariodante has everything you would expect.

Over the years, I’ve generally found performances at Royal Academy Opera to be enjoyable and straightforward. This production of Cendrillon went rather beyond that.

The Royal Academy of Music tonight presented the fruits of their latest postgraduate opera course with two short operas representing opposite ends of the musical timeline.Purcell’s miniature three-act opera really needs no introduction.

For an opera school production, it's a good idea to choose a classic: something that will focus the audience on the quality of the singers and orchestra rather than on innovation in the piece or programming.

One of the consistent joys of seeing a performance by the Royal Academy of Music's opera school is that they bring in world class conductors. At last night's La vera costanza, the orchestra, conducted by Trevor Pinnock, was exceptional.

Turning great novels into opera isn't a new idea - consider Prokofiev's War and Peace or Massenet's Werther - but it can be a tricky business: opera thrives on pace and high drama, while the greatest novels have time and space for reflection and character development.

Die Zauberflöte is probably the greatest singspiel ever composed (only Mozart's own Die Entführung aus dem Serail can compete for beauty), but it is rather difficult to stage because of its highly complicated story and abstruse and rather ambiguous masonic symbolism. But the music sweeps all before it with its extraordinary beauty, quality and variety.

When you go to a student opera production, even at an institution as prestigious as the Royal Academy of Music, you don't expect to see one of the opera world's conducting legends in the pit. But that's precisely what we had at last night's performance of Berlioz's Béatrice et Bénédict, in the shape of Sir Colin Davis (CH, CBE), a man with several thousand opera performances on the clock.

A handful of times in operatic history, a composer has thrown away the rule book and produced a work which defies categorisation because it simply isn't like anything else in the repertoire. Kurt Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper is one such work: musically and dramatically, neither Weill himself or anyone else has ever written anything remotely similar.

The Royal Academy of Music has a small but beautifully refurbished theatre, the 230 seat Sir Jack Lyons Theatre, where it stages full opera performances. Although many of the seats are taken by Academy staff, performers' friends and families, talent scouts and others with specific reasons for being there, some of the tickets are available to the public.