Performer: Andrew Greenan

Stuart Skelton’s visceral Peter Grimes is matched by a strong cast with thrilling playing and singing from the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Edward Gardner.

Amateur gangsters, but a nicely sung, if rather staid Lucia di Lammermoor at Buxton, worth seeing for its excellent mad scene.

The charm-ometer was cranked firmly to ‘high’ yesterday evening for the opening opera of this year’s Buxton Festival with a performance of The Jacobin, an opera close to Dvořák’s heart. 

Celebrating the Wagner centenary in 1913, the Hallé Orchestra gave a concert performance in Manchester of Acts II and III from Wagner’s epic final masterpiece Parsifal.

Military service brutalises. If you’re in any doubt about this, Berg’s short opera Wozzeck should dispel them, and particularly so in Carrie Cracknell’s new production for ENO.

When Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala in 1904, it was heavily booed. Few who attended that disastrous first performance could have imagined that, more than one hundred years on, it would have evolved into one of the most enduringly popular and widely performed operas in the world.