Artiste: Lajos Geiger

Attila Mókus's dramatic baritone was scornful at one moment, tender, distressed, vengeful, or broken in mourning at others, vocal signposts in Rigoletto’s descent into the hell of his own making.

Powerful and evocative imagery, both literal and implied, lingered on beyond the drop of the curtain.

The big heart and generous melodies of Ferenc Erkel's fine opera shine through in difficult circumstances in Atilla Vidnyánszky semi-abstract new staging at the Erkel Theatre.

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.

Polish opera director Michał Znaniecki created a new version of Zoltán Kodály’s 1927 The Spinning Room, a short one-act which is basically a collection of 21 Hungarian folksongs that Kodály had selected from the Székely region.

Hungarian composer Dohnányi's fourth and last opera is a comic delight, especially in the hands of the team at the Budapest Opera.