Performer: Rae Smith

Femi Elufowju's new staging of Verdi's classic is innovative, provocative and closely connected with the modern world.

A welcome return to the Glyndebourne Festival for Melly Still's staging, which brings out the full emotional range of Dvořák’s fairytale of denial, heartbreak and forgiveness.

David McVicar's uninspiring Cavalleria rusticana remains problematic, but a strong Pagliacci leaves the New York audience gasping. 

Sir David McVicar’s new production of Pelléas et Mélisande for Scottish Opera is stylish and lit like a painting. 

Antonín Dvořák’s Rusalka, moving between the worlds and rooted in myth, is a shivering opera to experience with its opulent music and its fantastical plot. 

The Met’s revival of David McVicar’s year-old take on the perennial Verismo twins strikes out emotionally in Cavalleria rusticana but scores high in Pagliacci. Working on the same set by Rae Smith, flanked by the forbidding stone walls of the town church, Cavalleria is dark, dark, dark – the very picture of a poor, unhappy Sicilian hill town.