Artiste: Tibor Szappanos

Individual performances impress, but conducting and production both prove too meandering in this year’s Wagner Days Tannhäuser.

Monteverdi’s last opera, recomposed by Máté Bella for a modern orchestra and a jazz combo, is an over-the-top, glitzy romp with plenty of casual sex and even more casual violence.

Stephen Gould is less than convincing in the lead role of Tannhäuser, but excellent ensemble work under Ádám Fischer's inspired direction offers compensations.

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.

Klára Kolonits's marvellous Lucia is the only thing brightening the bleak performance of the Hungarian State Opera's new Lucia di Lammermoor.