Artiste: Niel Joubert

Glyndebourne welcome audiences back into the house with a one hour Offenbach operetta whose comedy and plot lines are thin but which still delights.

“If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it.” There was certainly plenty of Shakespeare-inspired music on the bill for the London Philharmonic Orchestra's celebration of The Bard. 

A very concise, two-act opera which tells a bleak wartime tale of sacrifice, rarely performed and never realised to the satisfaction of its own composer. You could be forgiven for thinking I was describing something from 20th-century Germany, perhaps an expressionist work taking after Berg’s Wozzeck or similar. You’d be wrong.

The final of this year’s Handel Singing Competition, which opened the 2012 London Handel Festival, was a rare occasion when the winner of the First Prize matched the winner of the Audience Prize, giving satisfaction all round.