“Fear death by water,” says the fortune-teller in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. There were a few moments in Natalie Abrahami’s new production of The Turn of the Screw when I worried that the fine musicianship and otherwise smart direction in evidence all around might founder irrevocably beneath the sodden weight of its core conceit. For long sections, especially in the second act, the singers stand or splash around a waterlogged stage. 

Tamerlano, tyrannical Emperor of the Tartars, is a burger-munching boor with a golf-habit, a bulbous belly and a crashing disdain for other people’s sensitivities. In Orpha Phelan’s dynamic, gleefully idiosyncratic production of Handel’s 1724 opera, Trump’s shadow looms large, as Tamerlano tries to force Bajazet, Emperor of the Turks, to haggle for his freedom by offering up his daughter, Asteria, for Tamerlano’s sexual delight.

Harry Fehr’s directorial take on The Cunning Little Vixen is a sound one: keep it simple.

In one of the loveliest operatic scores of all time, Dvořák makes cruel demands on his eponymous water nymph and the prince for whom she acquires a mortal soul, having them soar above the stave countless times in anguish or ecstasy. Irish soprano Jennifer Davis and American tenor Ryan Capozzo are both equal to the challenge. 

Have you ever witnessed both a Tristan and an Isolde physically plausible and vocally up to everything that Wagner throws at them, from violent cursing to heartbreaking tenderness? I hadn't until yesterday. At first it seemed as if Yuval Sharon's supposedly controversial production would smother Lise Davidsen's Isolde and Michael Spyres' Tristan in concepts and restrict them to a narrow curve set back from the front of the stage and hovering above it. 

When the joyful energy at the final curtain - love briefly triumphant in the power-dominated world of Wagner's Ring - is as insanely high as it was at the end of a dizzying first act, that killer of a forging scene, you know this is a winner.

Most concerts of operatic excerpts serve up an after dinner mint. This one offered - to follow up Menotti's image of light versus serious in art - the very bread of life, albeit framed by familiar women's duets from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Delibes' Lakmé.

Janáček's Vixen Sharpears has been making streamlined runs between eight Irish cities and towns, no doubt winning new admirers for this singular take on man, nature and the cycle of life. The chamber concept has some problems, but the 13-piece orchestra still makes beautiful work of a ravishing score under Charlotte Corderoy, the voices all project perfectly over it and the basic set design by Maree Kearns is impressive given its need to fit into diverse smaller theatres. 

You’ll have seen the picture countless times. Gracing posters, postcards, tote bags, book and album covers, wrapping paper, phone cases and more, the iconic image of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" is thought to be the most reproduced visual artwork of all time. Created by Katsushika Hokusai in Edo period Japan, "The Great Wave" was one of the earliest woodblock prints; a medium which was rapidly developed in this period of Japanese history which allowed for mass production of images.

Mahagonny, the spider-web city sucking in men (and they are, even in this 2026 take, mostly men) with cash to burn, is the terminus of human greed and stupidity. It takes the first joint project between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, the perfect Mahagonny-Songspiel of 1927, only 20 minutes to get to the end, brushing the gloom aside with a shrug.