Performer: Amanda Woodbury

Strong vocals from the three principal singers and a sure musical direction from young conductor Farrell help offset some of the less than convincing elements to Olivia Fuchs' production. 

Conductor Leon Botstein and director Jean-Roumain Vesperini treat this Tudor soap opera with appropriate grandeur, while a top-notch cast deliver the vocal goods.

Michael Grandage's vivid production of Mozart's comic masterpiece is fast becoming a classic and is revived here to a very high standard.

Francesca Zambello sets the whole opera as a flashback, showing, during the prelude, the heroine surrounded by doctors and nurses in a sanatorium for patients dying from tuberculosis.