Artiste: Fiona Mackay

Opera Holland Park give us a broad span of human joys and tragedies in an excellently staged and acted rendering of Puccini's Il trittico.

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.

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.