Artiste: István Kovács

Martin Rajna's energetic conducting and Gabriella Balga's glorious Elisabetta are the bright spots in this flashy but empty house premiere of Donizetti's classic.

Calixto Bieito takes on Prokofiev's Tolstoy epic – and wins in the opera's Hungarian premiere. 

The Master and Margarita is a spectacular extravaganza indeed, streamed from Hungarian State Opera's Eiffel Art Studios.

With a convoluted production and uneven cast, Tamás Pál in the pit and Klára Kolonits as Erzsébet Szilágyi prove to be the highlights of the performance of this Erkel classic.

This double cast, nine-day revival of Vadim Milkov's staging of Pique Dame offers a relatively straight reading of Tchaikovsky's opera about the obsessive Pushkin-based character Herman. Embracing the opera's choral and dance passages, spectacle and pageantry are paramount; the drama's surreal and more nuanced dimensions could have been better profiled.

A warhorse on its own, Kálmán Nádasdy's 79-year-old production works surprisingly well, providing a nice evening's entertainment with a dedicated cast.