Guide to Hungarian State Opera

The score of Goldmark's opera is filled with lovely orchestral surprises, in addition to stunning arias, but is often filled with an abundance of slow tempos.

The third installment of Géza M. Tóth's staging of the Ring, this Siegfried is visually striking, but it's only a strong cast, and above all Egils Silins' Wanderer, that makes it worth attending.

With a convoluted production and uneven cast, Tamás Pál in the pit and Klára Kolonits as Erzsébet Szilágyi prove to be the highlights of the performance of this Erkel classic.

This double cast, nine-day revival of Vadim Milkov's staging of Pique Dame offers a relatively straight reading of Tchaikovsky's opera about the obsessive Pushkin-based character Herman. Embracing the opera's choral and dance passages, spectacle and pageantry are paramount; the drama's surreal and more nuanced dimensions could have been better profiled.

The Hungarian State Opera offered up a belated Hungarian première by one of its native sons, Péter Eötvös – his 2007 opera Love and Other Demons.