Wagner and Verfremdungseffekt: outstanding singing and subversive direction in Bayreuth's Siegfried

Opening the new opera season, Kent Nagano powerfully directs Mussorgsky's great psychodrama about a famous tsar, marred only by Frank Castorf's visually confusing and symbolically overweighted production. 

Adam Palka shines as the devil in this revival of Frank Castorf's multimedia staging that relocates the work to mid-20th century Paris, around the end of the Algerian War.

Faust and Méphistophélès pal around like buddies in Castorf's multi-media staging, the devil here less diabolical and more anarchistic party-boy. 

The profusion of images and ideas in Frank Castorf's Bavarian Staatsoper production of From the House of the Dead threatens to rob Janáček's opera of its humanity.

A thrilling new staging of Gounod's opera from the team that brought Bayreuth its current Ring, with musical rewards to match.