Artiste: Chen Shi-Zheng

Chinese dragons, Dalek-like pagoda towers: Opera Australia's harbour-side production of Turandot did not shy away from oriental imagery, leading to a spectacular evening's entertainment.

Toshio Hosokawa’s opera Matsukaze is in many ways a model of modern cross-cultural creation. Premièred in Brussels in 2011, it sets a story from the traditional Japanese Noh theater in a more or less Western operatic framework. And the text is in German.

I must confess: when the press release for the 2013 Lincoln Center Festival came out earlier this spring including an grand spectacle that is Monkey: Journey to the West, a multimedia operatic endeavor with music penned by Damon Albarn, I was immediately excited.

There’s usually plenty of hype surrounding a newly written opera performed at Covent Garden, but the carefully placed stories about Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune are on the improbable end of the scale, featuring a flying kebab shop and a team of breakdancers. So I arrived at Miss Fortune without any real idea of what I was going to get.