Performer: Alevtina Ioffe

Barber and Bernstein shine in this program exploring sharply contrasting faces of 20th-century Romanticism under guest conductor Alevtina Ioffe.

The Komische Oper's new, socially-distanced Offenbach staging shows plenty of glitzy defiance in its brief appearance before Germany's latest lockdown. 

It was like going on the journey from Kansas to the Land of Oz. After dank, dark drizzle on the streets outside, the scene inside the London Coliseum suddenly transformed into dazzling and vivid colour for this famous fairy-tale by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. 

On one level, Le Coq d’Or, Rimsky-Korsakov’s final opera, is a simple fairy tale. However, you don’t need to dig far to discover a biting satire, which was largely absent in this presentation by Les Saisons Russes du XXI Siècle.

With an opera like Carmen, one never knows exactly what to expect. Recent trends (with English National Opera, for instance) have been to up the levels of raunchiness in an attempt to recreate the original scandale which this depiction of lower-class immorality in 19th-century Seville met with in Paris in 1875.