Performer: Alexey Bogdanchikov

Opening the new opera season, Kent Nagano powerfully directs Mussorgsky's great psychodrama about a famous tsar, marred only by Frank Castorf's visually confusing and symbolically overweighted production. 

From stylised 16th-century dress to a 1970s sitcom ballet, Konwitschny's Staatsoper staging is full of brilliantly inventive touches, splendidly realised in this excellently sung revival. 

Hamburg's revival of a 2015 production is a musical success, but the director's concepts are sometimes too dense to tell a straightforward story.