Performer: Vanessa Goikoetxea

Thoughtful cuts, an extremely skillful orchestra and active, inventive staging made this sexy dark comedy engrossing and highly watchable. 

Cut-down Mozart meets monochrome cinema. This certainly won’t be the most sumptuous Don you’ll ever see, but it is committed, imaginative and admirably compact.

Good-time girl, hometown sweetheart, torn-apart lover, smugglers and rivals, familiar songs, a cliffhanger of a tale. 

The Gran Teatre del Liceu's revival of a shortened Merry Widow lacking some of the essence of this highly popular operetta.

The Festival della Valle d'Itria opened with a 20th century opera of some musical value, but of much more historical and philological interest for scholars.

In his whole career as an opera composer Puccini only wrote one pure comedy, Gianni Schicchi, and even that forms part of his trilogy Il Trittico, of which the other parts could hardly be more tragic. However, La bohème is also a comedy in its own way, a comedy cut short by tragedy.