Opera North opted for a more controversial opening to its 2014 production of La Traviata, a video of a bronchoscopy: Ellen Kent preferred the opulence of a society party in one of Paris’s up-market salons!

Given the tortured nature of Katja’s life, it may seem a little odd that Janacek dedicated the opera to the love of his life, as were the other two operas he wrote before he died. Her name was Kamila Stosslova. She was 25 and married when Janacek first saw her; he was 63. If this was an infatuation, it was one that endured through to the end of his life, and he wrote her some 700 love letters.

English National Opera (ENO) and Greater Manchester have announced a new working partnership to develop a new home for the opera company. The partnership will see ENO and Greater Manchester work together on plans to bring the company’s globally renowned cultural offer to a main base in the city-region by 2029.

Ey up, ow do. ‘Ave tha heard that, as part of the inaugural Bradford Opera Festival, there’s to be the premiere of Yorkshire poet, playwright, and broadcaster Ian McMillian’s new adaptation into the Yorkshire dialect of Rossini’s comical masterpiece The Barber of Seville?

Applications are now open for Opera North’s training scheme for emerging female conductors which seeks to address the gender imbalance within classical music.

A leading fixture on the classical music calendar, the Northern Aldborough Festival, opens with a rare opera double bill on 15 June 2023. The festival, which runs across ten days in the bucolic north Yorkshire village, offers audiences the chance to experience performances normally seen on cosmopolitan stages, in a rural village setting.

The Opera North Youth Orchestra and Youth Chorus will be joining forces for the very first time this Sunday 5 March when they perform Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin alongside professional soloists from the Chorus of Opera North. The concert performance of Eugene Onegin is being held at 3pm in the Great Hall at the University of Leeds.

Group Editor Andrew Palmer enjoys an all-round first-class production at Opera North, sizzling with comic finesse and music brilliance, and delivered with panache.

When it first opened in 1853, Bradford’s St George’s Hall might have been preparing for the arrival of Sir Charles Halle’s famous orchestra which would be created some five years later: fortunately, both are still going strong in 2023, more than a century and a half later.

It began at 4.30pm on a cold Bradford afternoon and, quite frankly, Opera North’s ‘The Best of the West End’ at St George’s Hall has got to be one of the classiest shows I have seen this year. My only regret is that I am unable to signpost you to the next performance of this ‘for one night only’ show which was absolutely stunning.

This Handel Opera was first performed in London, in 1715, in the first season under the reign of George 1, at the King’s Theatre on the Haymarket. The libretto has all the ingredients that make a good opera plot full of complex twists where the lovers Amadigi and Oriana are imprisoned by the sorceress Melissa (who seeks Amadigi’s love).

Whether an opera lover or not, you probably have an opinion about Richard Wagner. Wasn’t he the favourite composer of Adolf Hitler? Yes he was. Wasn’t he that paranoid anti-Semite? Yes he was. Didn’t critics in his own time describe his music as ‘immoral’, ‘poisonous’ and ‘degenerate’? Yes they did. However, wasn’t he also one of the greatest musical theorists of the European tradition?