Artiste: Maciek O'Shea

A great return appearance for English Touring Opera's Puccini double bill opening its spring tour at the Hackney Empire.

Eugene Onegin is one of the greatest of all operas, both musically and dramatically: Tchaikovsky's temperament and compositional proclivities find in the libretto the perfect characters and subject matter such that his particular genius is allowed to flourish and bloom, more fully and voluptuously than he ever managed before or after in the genre of opera.

In his wonderful BBC series on Italian opera, Antonio Pappano declared that "Puccini does love like no other composer," a phrase I've also heard from others.