Performer: Alvis Hermanis

A beautiful production by Alvis Hermanis of Madama Butterfly to open La Scala's new season, but it was Riccardo Chailly's presentation of Puccini's original 1904 score which caught the ear. 

Strauss' penultimate opera is treated to a lavish if superficial staging at the Salzburg Festival, but the real rewards come from the musical performance of this unjustly neglected work.

Staatsoper Berlin revives its new production of Tosca with an excellent cast including a last minute substitution of the tenor.

Tonight's setting of Die Soldaten in a WWI stable is so sordid you can almost feel the rats gnawing. Alvis Hermanis was right to warn in a newspaper interview that we would leave the theatre feeling shocked.

Alvis Hermanis' new Tosca for the Berliner Staatsoper mixes innovation with tradition in an interesting, but ultimately ineffective, way. 

The German thinker Theodor Adorno once wrote that a musical setting of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, considered in its own literary right a masterpiece, may well have proved redundant.