A highlight of this year’s Salzburg Festival was a new production of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio. It was largely deemed a vehicle to show off leading German tenor Jonas Kaufmann at his vocal and artistic zenith. And indeed, he did

Gaetano Donizetti‘s rarely performed masterpiece Roberto Devereux screams out for a truly great soprano as the Tudor Queen Elisabeth I. Certainly the most successful Donizetti opera commissioned by the great impresario Domenico Barbaja (in 1837), the work was largely forgotten

Since August 2014 the Opéra National de Paris has a new impresario, Stéphane Lissner. The Parisian returned to his hometown after a successful stint as the first non-Italian to run La Scala, Italy’s premier opera house.

The iconic egg-shaped structure of Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) sits forbiddingly surrounded by a man-made lake. It’s easy to miss the entrance ramp which leads to the box office lobby, the electronic ticket readers and the

(Berliner Staatsoper im Schillertheater – 22 February 2015) It’s just another Sunday night in February at a Berlin opera house: Wolfgang Schaeuble, German Finance Minister, sits in the stalls with his wife and without visible security two days after negotiating

Richard Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) is an opera with unusually extensive chorus segments. And Director Tim Albery’s production at the Royal Opera House puts the chorus to unusually good use. Enthusiastic, dramatically intense and vocally polished, this

The casual operagoer would be forgiven for not being sure whether The Royal Opera House’s new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Ballo in Maschera was set in Boston, as it usually is, or in Stockholm, as it often is and was

The Hong Kong Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden pulled off a real coup. Carefully marketing the orchestra’s first ever Rheingold, the first of the four operas of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle that the orchestra is spacing out over four years