Instrument: Theatre Company

The Queen of the Night appeared as a malevolent giant spider, complete with exoskeleton, threatening Tamino with her stabbing limbs and summoning hordes of smaller spiders to writhe over Pamina when the latter hesitated to commit to Sarastro's murder.

The German word Betroffenheit doesn’t translate easily to English. Any German-English dictionary will spit out approximations like "shocked" and "dismayed", but for a real translation, see Crystal Pite and Jonathan Young’s challenging, beautiful work by the same name. 

What is it about Arvo Pärt’s ‘Angel Music’ that appeals to the dying? Vanishing Point’s theatre and Scottish Ensemble’s playing combine to produce a thoughtful and poignant performance.  

La gazza ladra celebrates its 200th anniversary with a new production at La Scala, an earthbound effort from director Gabriele Salvatores, but it was Riccardo Chailly who drew the wrath of sections of the Milanese audience. 

Garsington’s first collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company married an abridgement of Shakespeare’s play with Mendelssohn’s incidental music, a union which promised much but which stumbled awkwardly.

Song in a Strange Land is an evocative blend of concert jazz dance, jazz music, and literary texts layered to tell diasporic and lived memories of African Americans.

Die Zauberflöte is a work whose outward simplicity masks internal complexity and even contradictions. Mozart’s music is childishly tuneful and yet reaches for the classically sublime; Emmanuel Schikaneder’s libretto alternates a magical quest story out of a German storybook with Masonic claptrap and secondhand Voltaire.