Performer: Claire Wild

Tough, thrilling, ambitious and new: The Skating Rink is an exciting new major commission by Garsington, and its world première delivered on every level.

Welsh National Opera’s new season commemorating the centenary of the 1917 Revolution with three Russian-themed works opens with both a bang and a whimper with this trenchant revival.

A superb Susanna and an excellent Count make this small-scale, traditional and period Marriage of Figaro from Regents Opera feel truly fresh and alive. 

Director Alessandro Talevi’s imagination, wit and audacity meant that Don Giovanni, which has just launched Opera North’s new season, was a huge success. The production was enthralling throughout, never dragging or disappointing, even in the second act. It works much better than others I have seen, because the emphasis is placed firmly on the comic rather than the pathetic.

In a promotional video for Opera North's new production of From The House of the Dead, director John Fulljames gives us two seemingly opposing views on Leoš Janáček's final opera- that it is “the most intense opera of the twentieth century,” but also a piece in which “very little happens.