DVD review of Christof Loy's production of Die Frau ohne Schatten which could hardly be more different from the Wernicke production at the Met.

Blu-ray review of Jake Heggie's rather excellent Moby Dick at San Francisco Opera.

The COC Ensemble Studio competition gala at the Four Seasons Centre last night.

Topher Mokrzewski's take on the Rob Ford debacle

Joel Ivany's production of Korngold's Silent Serenade

First class Blu-ray of Die Zauberflöte from Simon Rattle and Robert Carsen

Also the lemur and I are off to New York on Monday for a few days of kulchur which will involve several galleries and Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Met.  First though I have a Mozart Requiem to attend to commemorate a year since the death of the young sister of a friend.  It's in a good cause.

Christof Nel does a very good job of staging Handel's Belshazzar.  More...

David McVicar's Metropolitan Opera production of Verdi's Il Trovatore isn't very innovative but it's well sung.  More...

Dmitri Tcherniakov's rather radical Don Giovanni at the Aix-en-Provence festival makes very interesting viewing on a technically superb Blu-ray recording.  More...

It's a co-pro with the Canadian Opera Company so it should be headed for Toronto.  What might it look like?

Cavalli's Ercole amante was written for the marriage of Louis XIV and a Habsburg princess.  It gets a spectacular, but fairly conventional, production from "bad boy" David Alden in this 2009 production from Amsterdam.  More...

There's finally a video recording of Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide and it's very good indeed.  More...

The Met HD broadcast of Adams' Nixon in China from February 2011 has been released on DVD and Blu-ray.  More...

It's Salburg 2008 and Don G and Leporello are junkies inhabiting a claustrophobic pine forest.  All the women are still fixated with DG who is dying from a bullrt wound acquired in the opening scene. It's fascinating with some great performances.  More...

On the face of it, a staged version of Handel's Messiah is an odd idea.  Claus Guth's 2009 staging from Vienna though really gets inside the piece and sheds new insights on text and music.  More...