Performer: Marta Świderska

Opening the new opera season, Kent Nagano powerfully directs Mussorgsky's great psychodrama about a famous tsar, marred only by Frank Castorf's visually confusing and symbolically overweighted production. 

Despite some fine young voices, a concert staging of The Rake's Progress proves problematic in Hamburg.

Hamburg's revival of a 2015 production is a musical success, but the director's concepts are sometimes too dense to tell a straightforward story.