December 2025

2025 International Opera Awards Shortlist

Our cover shows Mason Bates’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay at the Metropolitan Opera, with Efraín Solis as Salvador Dalí and Sun-Ly Pierce as Rosa Saks

Features inside include:

Shortlists for the 2025 International Opera Awards

From the Ionian Sea to Athens: spotlight on the operatic repertoire of Greece

100 years of Wozzeck

Mary Ann Smart considers interpretations of Bellini’s I puritani ahead of its new Metropolitan Opera production

In the first of a new series about producing opera, Anthony Freud talks to the conductors Edward Gardner, Vladimir Jurowski, Eun Sun Kim and Speranza Scappucci

Alexandra Wilson explores TV’s effect on the democratization of opera

Our rising start is the UK bass-baritone Ossian Huskinson, who sings in the Royal Opera’s Turandot this month

Reviews this month include Dalinda in Amsterdam; Pompeo Magno in Bayrueth; Macbeth in Boston; Falstaff in Brussels; Tosca in Cardiff; Das Paradies und die Peri in Hamburg; Lohengrin in Hanover; Les Vêpres siciliennes, Cinderella and The Rape of Lucretia in London; West Side Story in Los Angeles; Otello in Madrid; The Fairy Queen in Montevideo; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and La sonnambula in New York; Satyagraha in Nice; Rusalka in Oslo; Otello in Parma; Il viaggio a Reims in Philadelphia; The Turn of the Screw in Rome; Dead Man Walking in San Francisco; Falstaff in Shanghai; Tosca in Venice; Die Fledermaus, The Bartered Bride and Die Zauberflöte in Vienna; I Lituani in Vilnius; The Best City in the World in Warsaw.