Performer: Morten Frank Larsen

Vienna State Opera offered a solid production in which precious little gleamed.

High intensity girl power for a complex task: Simone Young shines in the pit, Karoline Gruber’s staging convinces with expertise and attention to detail.

Stephen Sondheim's gruesome masterpiece Sweeney Todd enjoys a successful and overdue première run at the Vienna Volksoper.

The message of Voltaire’s novel Candide, ou l’Optimisme is that rationality and reason, rather than custom, faith or authoritative orders should determine all human activity, and although this quintessence of the Age of Enlightenment sounds self-evident nowadays, a visit to the newspaper kiosk shows us otherwise: a lot of luridly-titled guidebooks and magazines try to talk us into believing that a

Leonard Bernstein’s Mass is massive. And massively odd. I thought I had prepared myself for what was in store before this piece’s Proms debut on Monday, but actually I hadn’t.

Manon, Mimi, Tosca and Cio-Cio San. Why does Puccini send these women to such heartless deaths? It’s a question which musicologist Mosco Carner answered in the 1950s with a speculative Freudian reduction (the composer apparently had a debilitating mother complex).