Composers have harnessed TV and cinema since Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors pulled in five million viewers 75 years ago but for my money Kombat Opera’s satire showed us how to do it best

It’s not even Halloween, but here’s an operatic Christmas story for you. This is the 75th anniversary of the first opera made for television: Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, broadcast at Yuletide in 1951 and watched by five million people across the US in a production sponsored by Hallmark. You can watch the original broadcast on YouTube: it was introduced with wit, self-deprecation and early 50s elegance by Menotti himself (vastly less charmingly, the role of King Balthazar was played by a singer in blackface). Chet Allen’s performance as the boy, Amahl, is staggering, and even more moving is Rosemary Kuhlmann’s Mother, especially in her aria, All That gold!.

Amahl is “an opera for children because it tries to recapture my own childhood”, Menotti said. It was played on US TV every Christmastime throughout the 50s, and was recorded and remade in new productions the next decade, while the BBC picked it up in 1953, and there was even an Australian TV version. Less than an hour long, Menotti’s festive fable works because of the intimacy of its story, and its refusal to patronise its intended audience.

A decade after the premiere of his work setting Kane’s hard-hitting play, it’s returning to the Royal Opera House. The composer remembers its fevered beginnings, the sweat and tears shed along the way, and how it changed his life forever

In January 2015, I was on an overnight flight coming back from New York, having attended Prototype, a festival of new opera. I didn’t sleep a wink, but worked without stopping in a packed, dark, sleepy cabin, reading and annotating a book and furiously making notes on my laptop. As if in a fever dream, my mind whirled with text, music, dramaturgy, theatre.

Those six nocturnal hours were some of the most creatively fertile of my life. The book was 4.48 Psychosis; the annotations became the blueprint for an opera. Sarah Kane’s text had unlocked something in me, a fervour, a deluge of ideas. I could barely keep up, noting every impulse, every fantasy, as my mind pinballed around.

Descendant of 19-century artist demands removal of Marc Chagall’s 1960s canvasses that cover original fresco

In 1962, the then French culture minister, André Malraux, reportedly bored by the ballet he was watching at Paris’s opera house, raised his eyes to the classical ceiling and decided it needed a makeover.

In his ennui, Malraux thought his friend and artist Marc Chagall, sitting next to him at the Palais Garnier at the time, was the man for the job and commissioned him to make a new ceiling.

One year into the role, the Royal Opera’s music director is taking on the challenge of Parsifal, and, next season, the Ring Cycle. I’m here, and I am courageous says the conductor

‘You can choose the cautious option – or you can take the full risk and just go and conduct. Maybe I would like the cautious option, but I never choose it.” Jakub Hrůša learned to trust his instincts at the Royal Opera House back in 2022 when he conducted his first ever Wagner opera – Lohengrin – there, describing the experience as “one of the absolute highlights of my life”. Now he’s a year into his role as the house’s music director and about to conduct his first Parsifal, staged by Evgeny Titov. And next season there’ll be yet more Wagner firsts when he conducts complete cycles of the Ring as staged by Barrie Kosky. For most conductors, this would be a gradual process, adding the four Ring operas to their repertoire one by one, but not for Hrůša: he’ll be conducting his first Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung all in the space of a week.

“Is it too bold? I find it wonderful!” he says. “I could have chosen to do it in my own way, in 10 years’ time, somewhere else – but I’m here, I’m the music director, the Ring should be done and wants to be done in its entirety, and I am courageous.”

Bonnet/Dutrieux/Czech Philharmonic/Vasilek
(Animal Music)
Honegger’s multifaceted 1935 composition about the French saint is brought to life in spine-tingling detail by Lukáš Vasilek, the Czech Philharmonic and actors and musicians

Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher is a neglected masterpiece. Composed in 1935 to a text by Paul Claudel, it reviews the French saint’s life in flashback as she awaits execution. Eleven episodes explore her physical and mental trials, with actors playing Jeanne and her confidant Frère Dominique alongside a cast of solo singers and full chorus. Honegger’s score blends medieval modes and folk melody with Stravinskian neoclassicism and jazz, while his eclectic orchestration includes three saxophones, pianos and the eerie wail of the ondes Martenot.

This new recording gets everything right. Lukáš Vasilek directs the Czech Philharmonic in a dramatically nuanced and scrupulously engineered account. Set pieces land body blows. Jeanne’s examination before a tribunal of anthropomorphic animals sizzles with faux-Hollywood fanfares and a scabrous comedic energy. Kyle van Schoonhoven has fun as Porcus, the pig elected to preside over her trial. The game of cards, where blase English and French nobility use her as a bargaining chip, is razor-sharp. The Prague Philharmonic Choir and Children’s Choir are splendidly muscular. Hovering over it all are Jeanne’s otherworldly voices – the Virgin, Sainte Catherine and Sainte Marguerite – captured here in spine-tingling detail.

Baritone with an appealing tonal quality who was an enterprising explorer of song and more than 70 roles in opera

The Scottish baritone Henry Herford, who has died aged 79, was notable for the breadth of his repertoire – offering sterling performances of often neglected works – and his warm, appealing tonal quality.

He began his career in the Glyndebourne Opera Chorus (1977-78). In those years he also impressed in small solo roles, as a well-projected, spontaneous Forester in Cunning Little Vixen and the Speaker in Magic Flute. He returned to Glyndebourne in 1981 as a fiery Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and with a powerfully delivered Boris Pasternak (a key figure who narrates the action) in Nigel Osborne’s Electrification of the Soviet Union (1987-88).

Royal Opera House, London
This revival of Richard Jones and Antony McDonald’s 2022 staging has kept most of its excellent original cast Lisette Oropesa is imperious and gleaming as the enchantress Alcina

Handel, but make it fun. Perhaps that was Richard Jones’s brief for his production of Alcina, first seen here in 2022 and revived by Sarah Fahie, its original movement director. And of all Handel’s operas perhaps it’s this one, with its desert-island storyline of sorcery and sex – what happens on the island stays on the island – that invites this treatment.

Jones makes the “good guys” into members of a kind of puritan cult, so the tension between the moral world and the sensual, instinctive one is less of a gentle pull, more a tug of war. Alcina’s prisoners are transformed by a squirt of her eponymous perfume into birds and animals – a parrot, a mandrill, a King Charles spaniel, all wearing prosthetic heads so beautifully made that for the past year or two they have been in display cases in the Royal Opera House foyer. The animals are kept busy fawning over Alcina or moving Antony McDonald’s sets around: there’s a huge bed, a greenhouse and an enchanted forest on wheeled platforms, found behind the doors of what might be a hotel corridor. It’s a wide stage, and there’s often at least one singer running across it. Amid all this, the opera’s moments of warmth, insight and introspection risk getting lost or at least overshadowed. It’s brittle, but it is entertaining.

The colourful and larger-than-life staging of the opera about an enchantress who transforms her lovers into beasts returns to the Royal Opera stage this week. We went behind the scenes on the final day of rehearsals

All photos: Tristram Kenton

• Alcina is at the Royal Opera House from 15 September to 3 October

Soprano whose strength lay in her ability to invest her characterisations with dramatic force

The Romanian soprano Ileana Cotrubas, who has died aged 87, was admired internationally, not least in Great Britain, where she lived at the start of her career, and Vienna, where she and her husband later made their home. What lent her lyric soprano voice, which may have lacked the voluptuousness and amplitude of other celebrated singers, its distinctive nature was its tightly focused tonal quality (occasionally criticised as plangent), combining inner strength with a touching vulnerability. She was also an excellent actor (her exemplar was Maria Callas), her stage portrayals tellingly incarnating the often wounded women she played.

Outstanding among these was her Violetta in La Traviata, which encompassed the character’s frailty, her zest for life, her exuberance and her inescapably tragic situation, in performances that were throbbing with passion and almost unbearably intense. The cumulative sweep of the phrases in her dazzling rendition of Sempre Libera, as captured in a celebrated Deutsche Grammophon recording with Carlos Kleiber, and the profoundly poignant Dite alla Giovine, in which she bids farewell to the past and to life, demonstrate perfectly the qualities for which Cotrubas is remembered.

The Pit, Barbican, London
Renell Shaw and TD Moyo’s new opera, with libretto by April Koyejo-Audiger, tells a tragic story of two cousins. Gamba Cole shines as Adjani

‘There’s no ocean big enough to hold these black boys’ tears,” a young man sings. But what about a genre big enough? Our Eyes Looking for God – a show that aims to explore the “Black British experience” – finds a framework for the extravagant, baroque emotions, intensities and stories of its subject matter in opera. In many ways it’s a natural fit – or could be.

Created in 2020 by writer, director and activist TD Moyo and award-wining composer Renell Shaw, the piece grows out of Moyo’s personal grief for a brother murdered in south London and the global race rage after George Floyd’s death. Moyo weaves both threads into the story of Liverpool cousins Adjani and Kamal. Adjani’s decision to leave for London sparks a final night of reminiscences, celebrations, farewells and violent tragedy for two boys who – spoiler alert – may already be dead before the action begins.

(Decca)
Focusing on five Verdian heroines (and anti-heroines), the soprano has chosen roles that fit her formidable vocal talents perfectly. Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra provide detailed accompaniment for these striking portraits

At some point, any star soprano worth her salt will try her hand at a Verdi album. Lise Davidsen avoids the fate of those who attempt to encompass the composer’s entire cast of leading ladies, focusing instead on five who fit her vocal talents like a glove.

She opens with a commanding Lady Macbeth, her coloratura clean as a whistle and with gleaming, seemingly effortless top notes. Edward Gardner’s buoyant yet spacious way with the orchestral accompaniment affords Davidsen sufficient elbow room to create a more thoughtful schemer than is sometimes the case, culminating in a seamless sleepwalking scene where her breath control alone deserves a Grammy.

Hoare/Briscein/Crowe/LSO/Rattle
(LSO Live)
In this beautifully balanced live recording Simon Rattle, the London Symphony Orchestra and an outstanding cast make the music sing and dance

Janáček’s comedy can be a charmer on stage but it’s a devil to get your head around on disc. Based on satirical stories by Svatopluk Čech – who even puts in an appearance in Act II – Mr Brouček (or Mr Beetle in Czech) is a petty minded, puffed-up landlord with an insatiable appetite for beer and sausages. The first half propels our sozzled antihero on an imaginary flight to the moon where he proceeds to puncture the pretensions of the artsy-fartsy inhabitants. The second half deposits him in the thick of the 15th-century Hussite wars where, cowardly to the core, he singularly fails to cover himself in glory. Amid the fun and games, the conversational text flies by at a discombobulating rate of knots.

This recording takes pride of place in the catalogue thanks in part to Simon Rattle’s illuminating way with the music. Not only does he make it sing and dance – bagpipes and all – he brings out every quirk and colour of Janáček’s imaginative score. By giving the opera room to breathe, listeners have the best chance yet of appreciating the composer’s fertile wit and gift for musical storytelling.

Andrew Hiers is trying to start his own opera company. Until then, he’s serenading the parking lot

Andrew Hiers, 38, is an opera singer – a bass-baritone – and a car salesman in Cocoa, Florida. You might think these professions have nothing to do with each other, but his librettos about cars or to customers have gone viral – all part of a larger plan to bring opera to the local community.

What time did you wake up?

A succubus, a cycling champ and Sir Elton Scone walk into a bar … and our photographer Murdo MacLeod was there to capture every moment

• All our Edinburgh festival reviews

Akhmetshina/Pappano
(Decca)
The mezzo-soprano lends supple and elegant voice to art song and musical numbers that explore womanhood

Acclaimed for embodying opera’s femme fatales such as Carmen and Dalia, Aigul Akhmetshina explores womanhood more broadly on her second album, Mujer Fatal. Accompanied on piano by Antonio Pappano, the repertoire ranges from Spanish, French and Russian art song, to Broadway and beyond.

The title track, written by Elena Roussanova especially for the Bashkortostan-born mezzo-soprano, sets the tone. Akhmetshina’s supple instrument wraps itself around the languid vocal lines while Pappano’s sensitive touch draws out the music’s delicate melismas. Two of Montsalvatge’s Canciones Negras find the singer spinning long-breathed melodies, dipping down elegantly into her burgundy lower register.

The late-night host’s recent stints on Days of Our Lives and General Hospital have brought viewers to a dwindling genre

A man in a dark suit steps down from a helicopter into the aftermath of a warehouse shootout. Flanked by machine gun-toting members of his tactical team, he stalks through the carnage. Without breaking stride, he comes to a defeated fighter lying face down, reaching for a handgun, and shoots him at close range. The man stops in front of another fighter clinging to life, causing her to recoil in fear. “Everything’s gonna be OK,” John Oliver says, as the camera eases into focus for his closeup. “I’m here to help.”

For the past two months, US daytime television watchers have been reduced to double takes and stitches as the Last Week Tonight host has embarked on a summer side quest to become a soap opera star. It began with a three-episode arc on General Hospital with Oliver making his grand entrance as Z, head of the deep state-coded World Security Bureau. And it continued this week with another three-episode arc on Days of Our Lives as Devlin St John, chief water inspector for the soap’s mythic town of Salem.

How does it feel to be locked into a venue notorious for its unpadded seating to experience a full-throttle Ring cycle and more? Our critic found out at the 150th anniversary of the mighty Bayreuth festival

Liszt and Bruckner were there from the start. Debussy, Mahler and Puccini all subsequently made the journey. So did writers from Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann to WEB Du Bois, not to mention choreographer Sergei Diaghilev, anarchist Emma Goldman, British fascist Diana Mosley (wife of Oswald) and – most notoriously and fanatically – Adolf Hitler.

Culturally and politically, Germany’s Bayreuth festival doesn’t so much have baggage as its own industrial-scale luggage hangar. But it’s also prized as the ultimate place to hear Richard Wagner’s operas. One hundred and fifty years after the composer launched the festival with the premiere of his epic Ring cycle, tickets for this summer’s edition sold out within 90 minutes. No mean feat for a theatre with famously uncomfortable seats, no air conditioning and only one man’s music on the menu. The shortest work lasts two-and-a-half hours without a break.

Royal Albert Hall, London
There’s a new narration delivered by Tamsin Greig and the crack forces of the Monteverdi Choir, the ORR and world-class singers, all led by Mark Elder, but the 200-year-old piece remains a strange hybrid

Pirates! Princesses! Mermaids! Fairies! A magic horn! You name it and Carl Maria von Weber chucked it at Oberon – his fantastical, nonsensical, often farcical romp of a final opera, which sees a French knight and his Arabian beloved subjected to magical trials and hardships so that fairy king Oberon can win an argument with queen Titania.

You can see how it happened. The opera’s English libretto (the work was premiered at Covent Garden in 1826) is based on a German poem, itself adapting a French chivalric romance, is a patchwork whose lumpen dialogue (and, latterly, unpalatable attitudes) have rendered it all but unstageable in living memory. Enter Mark Elder, the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir to give Oberon a Proms premiere 200 years in the making.