August 2026

The artist Frida Kahlo appears on our front cover this month, as personified by Isabel Leonard in El último sueño de Frida y Diego by Gabriela Lena Frank and Nilo Cruz at the Metropolitan Opera.

Inside you’ll find reviews of performances from around the world, CD recordings and features including:

The great British soprano Felicity Lott remembered and celebrated by Jane Glover and Rupert Christiansen.

Also obituaries of Speight Jenkins, long-time General Director of Seattle Opera, and the influential television director Brian Large.

Anna Patalong talks to John Allison about the challenges of running British Youth Opera while maintaining an international singing career and not forgetting the school run.

The bestselling crime writer Agatha Christie was passionate, and very well informed about opera and had ambitions to be a singer herself, as Natsuko Hirakura discovers.

In our series on the component parts of opera productions, Anthony Freud talks to the costume and set designers Marie-Jeanne Lecca, John Macfarlane, Christopher Oram and Vicki Mortimer.

The soprano Jana McIntyre is our Stage Door artist of the month, talking to Rebecca Paller as she prepares to sing Aithra in Die ägyptische Helena and Constanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Bard SummerScape.

Productions reviewed around the world include: El último sueño de Frida y Diego in New York, Stiffelio in Vienna, The Passenger in Amsterdam, La fanciulla del West at Opera Holland Park, I puritani in Turin, Andrea Chénier in Wilmington, Fin de partie in Basel, Of One Blood in Munich, El amor brujo and La vida breve in Mexico City, The Drover’s Wife in Brisbane, La traviata at Garsington Opera, Lucia di Lammermoor in Bydgoszcz, Pelléas et Mélisande at La Scala, Nabucco in Minsk, Tosca at Glyndebourne, Der Waffenschmied in Leipzig, Angel’s Bone from English National Opera in Manchester, Scylla et Glaucus in Zurich, Roméo et Juliette in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Die Walküre in Cologne, Tannhäuser in Zagreb, Medusa in Brussels, Turandot in Atlanta