Performer: Enrique Mazzola

Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda is perhaps most famous for a single and highly emotional scene in which two monarchs engage in a venomous confrontation. One is doomed to die. 

Oliver Py's new Meyerbeer staging offers plenty of clichés, but is a solid show, backed up by a fine musical performance.

Questionable identities, clandestine messages, love and money are the stuffs of Gioacchino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, revived again in Zurich.

In the absence of an indisposed Christoph von Dohnányi, Enrique Mazzola impressed in a perfectly formed programme with the Philharmonia. 

Strong vocal talent rules the night, and a late moment of visual splendor caps off a serviceable reading of a battered warhorse.