Performer: David DQ Lee

Nigel Lowery’s new production at Prague State Opera is a gusher of ideas, starting as slapstick but profoundly moving by the end.

Propora's Mitridate at Schloss Schwetzingen lacks dramatic sense (blame librettist Cibber and director Spirei). But exciting music strongly delivered makes a case for more Porpora in the repertoire.

The auditorium's lights flared up, drawing a blinking audience back into the room. The fourth wall was well and truly broken, and each of us was given no option but to acknowledge our responsibility for the planet.

Signs of birth and death – but moreso death – flash continuously through the Latvian director Viestur Kairish’s new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which opened the Komische Oper Berlin’s 2013/14 season.

With two happy endings, two recognition scenes, and a second act that seems more of a self-contained sequel than a conclusion to the first, Gluck’s Telemaco has come in for a musicological pasting over the years for its alleged weaknesses of dramatic content and construction.

Wolfgang Katschner servierte erneut eine tempo- und genussreiche Barockoper auf dem Silbertablett.