Performer: La Monnaie Chorus

Thaddeus Strassberger’s Brussels debut presents Berlioz's opera semiseria with plenty of good music but far more visual noise. 

A marathon double bill using music from Verdi's early operas largely falls flat in Brussels. 

Dmitri Tcherniakov's staging turns Rimsky-Korsakov's opera into storytelling for an autistic boy, but does he deliver a fairy tale ending? 

Laurent Pelly exploits the satirical side of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel at La Monnaie in a darkly humorous but colourfully performed production.

Despite its failings, La Monnaie turn Gaspare Spontini's 1805 La vestale into a fascinating evening's opera.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Scorned womanhood has no better archetype than Euripides's Medea. And you're unlikely to see a more powerful or affecting Medea than Nadja Michael's performance in Cherubini's opera Médée, in the first production of the new season at La Monnaie in Brussels (De Munt, if you're a Flemish speaker.)Like all good Greek tragedy, we all know the story.