Performer: Peter Brooke

Danyal Dhondy's new opera Shahrazad focuses on the brave young heroine who spins her stories each evening to keep her husband, King Shahryār, enthralled... and what happened when Shahrazad finished telling her final tale.

A superb Susanna and an excellent Count make this small-scale, traditional and period Marriage of Figaro from Regents Opera feel truly fresh and alive. 

If Debussy intended Pelléas et Mélisande as a deliberate anti-Tristan, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore perhaps stumbled into the role. Donizetti was of course not responding to Wagner’s opera (which would not be written for another three decades) but to the legend Wagner would also draw on, with results that were rather more... German, shall we say, than the sunlit uplands of L’elisir.