The 50 best shows to see at the Edinburgh Festivals 2023
From theatre to comedy, and opera to dance and art, our critics pick the essential performances to look out for this year in Edinburgh
From theatre to comedy, and opera to dance and art, our critics pick the essential performances to look out for this year in Edinburgh
Opera Holland Park's new staging of the Puccini favourite recasts the action as playing out on a 1950s film set – with mixed results
Longborough Festival Opera's new staging of Monteverdi's great music drama scores highly for energy, less so for eloquence
The epitome of quality community opera, Benjamin Britten's poignant piece features an orchestra made up of fantastic young musicians
From Pulp and the Proms to Barbie and The Bear, our critics mark your cultural calendar for July and August
The composer’s ‘mixed media’ exploration of memory is an odd mix of slippery storytelling and overheated, didactic music
The 31-year-old American soprano, soon to make her UK debut at Glyndebourne, on discipline, class diversity and playing mercurial women
El Saadawi’s powerful novel about female oppression has been recast as a two-hander in Bushra El Turk's opera – with mixed results
By focusing on quality over gimmicks, a recent clutch of productions at Garsington reminds us that opera is not just about a good night out
Russian performers gave this fine production of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece a compelling authenticity – and ramped up the drama
Even faced with a 35 per cent funding cut, WNO give Bernstein's tricky take on Voltaire a valiant, handsome staging
The celebrity tenor returns but it is Aigul Akhmetshina who scores the major triumph in this staging of Massenet's opera
Opera Holland Park's new Humperdinck staging charts a safe, if slightly erratic, middle course between horror and fairy-tale
Rome in 1800 becomes the same city under the Nazis, in a bold new staging from Grange Park Opera that also gets all the basics right
Francis Poulenc’s tale of the nuns of Compiègne caught up in the terror of the French Revolution is magnificently staged and performed
Sarah Angliss retells the tragic story of the ‘Irish Giant’, Charles Byrne, whose height brought misery – before, and after, his death
This splendid production at the Grange Festival combines the most unpalatable truths of Mozart's work and some gorgeous designs
Grange Park Opera's new staging of Wagner's masterpiece is ingenious, a little over-quirky, and beautifully sung
As his latest production opens at Glyndebourne, the superstar director talks class, Catholicism – and why Australia is a 'disaster'
The levelling up agenda is about to wreck one of Britain’s great cultural institutions