Desperate Housewives and Troy Boys

Mozart’s original The Magic Flute is bizarre enough. The story of a prince and a bird-catcher’s journey to save a princess they’ve never met from a sinister quasi-Freemason who turns out to be alright, it is sufficiently packed full of great songs and good humour to have become an enduring repertory favourite – but that doesn’t mean it makes any sense. It doesn’t, really. It is a daft opera.

They say that Violetta in La Traviata is one of opera's hardest soprano parts. Violetta changes character completely over the opera's three acts – all the way from voracious party girl to delicate, dying consumptive – and the singer must be in complete control of the role to make this work. The musical part, of course, is hardly easy either.

Some 30 years after its first appearance, Robert Lepage’s double bill of Duke Bluebeards Castle and Erwartung is still strikingly effective and very modern-looking music theatre.

Beautifully prepared singing and playing brings out the tender side to Berg's modernist classic as part of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival.