Performer: Naomi O'Connell

Elena Langer's gorgeous and tongue-in-cheek Figaro Gets a Divorce shines in Geneva, despite David Pountney's boxy libretto. 

Elena Langer and David Pountney's new WNO opera Figaro Gets a Divorce did not disappoint. Langer's new refreshing score had flair and imagination in a memorable performance.

Lothar Koenigs conducted a musically excellent and dramatically straightforward performance of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro in Cardiff.

Vert-Vert, undoubtedly the only opera named after a dead parrot, is a very, very silly opera – more a series of comic sketches than an integrated work. But in Garsington's production, everything delights.

Henri Bergson famously defined comedy as “something mechanical encrusted on the living”. One suspects that Jacques Offenbach would have been a fan of this definition, and that Christopher Alden most certainly is.

The West End/Broadway musical is alive and well, raking in millions with its blend of light music, song and dance routines and not-too-taxing drama. But its spiritual ancestor, the operetta, is an unfashionable beast.