Artiste: Oren Gradus

The audience for The Met's first performance of La fanciulla del West this season arrived loaded for bear. Not only were they disappointed that Jonas Kaufmann was not singing (he's slated for shows starting 17th October), but their disappointment was heightened by the fact that tenor Yusif Eyvazov was singing.

Despite starry bel canto experts such as Joyce DiDonato, Lawrence Brownlee and maestro Michele Mariotti, a 2013 Paul Curran staging of Rossini’s La donna del lago reads vacuous on The Metropolitan Opera stage.

Odyssey Opera's concert performance of Le Cid is sadly compromised by the size of the hall. 

A menacing rather than a bucolic setting for The Met's new production of La donna del lago, but the proof is in the singing... 

Everything about the opening scene of this production set me on edge: centre-stage a hybrid bed on wheels, part crib part hospital, and propped up on it, peering through the bars, a young female, presumably Lucia. The set is a high-walled room, dingy white, plaster stained, paper peeling, with  a short door and elongated windows suggesting a surreal Alice-in-Wonderland distortion.

Read our review of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's production of Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito in its 2012 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.