Performer: Rebecca von Lipinski

Outstanding singing from a beautifully chosen cast led by Miah Persson and Hanna Hipp. 

Oper Stuttgart’s new production of The Queen of Spades (Pique-Dame) pushes a directorial tendency to update opera to a modern setting to an extreme.

Mozart's messy monster of an opera gets a brutalist tidy-up at Garsington, but the determinedly straightforward reading only makes this work's innate problems more obvious.