November 2022

Welsh National Opera’s new production of The Makropoulos Case is on our front cover, and reviewed inside.

Jiří Heřman talks to John Allison as he prepares to direct a Janáček double bill in Brno.

Is there such a thing as free opera? David Chandler examines whether easy access to anything online devalues the art form.

James Conway looks back at his two decades in charge of English Touring Opera and considers the future, in conversation with Guy Dammann.

Bryan Coxson celebrates the brief flowering of the British National Opera Company.

Disc of the month is Lully’s Acis et Galatée, with Ambroisine Bré, Cyril Auvity and Edwin Crossley-Mercer and Les Talens Lyriques, conducted by Christophe Rousset (Aparté)

For the record: opera deputy editor Henrietta Bredin picks the 1956 recording of Der Rosenkavalier, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Christa Ludwig, Teresa Stich-Randall and Otto Edelmann

Reviews this month include: The Makropoulos Case at Welsh National Opera, Aida at Covent Garden, La traviata in Belfast, Siegfried and Götterdammerung at Grimeborn, Falstaff, Carmen and M. Butterfly at Santa Fe, Jenůfa in Geneva, John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra and Don Giovanni in San Francisco, Arabella in Essen, Il trovatore in Sydney, Rusalka in Prague, Die Walküre in Helsinki and Hendrik Hofmeyr’s Sara Baartman in Cape Town.