A red hot ticket at the Metropolitan Opera in 2010/2011 was Donizetti’s comic gem, Don Pasquale, with Anna Netrebko reviving Norina, the part that made her a star in New York. Opera summed up the simple truth: “. . . everyone adored her”.

Festival d'Aix-en-Provence has firmly established itself as France’s preeminent summer festival and is a key fixture on the international festival calendar. It is particularly in the field of opera that the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence continues to break new ground and this release from the 2016 festival demonstrates that. In this new staging – a coproduction with the Opéra de Lille, Théâtre de Caen – Emmanuelle Haïm directs Le Concert d’Astrée with a star-studded cast including Franco Fagioli, Sara Mingardo, Michael Spyres, and exclusive Erato artist Sabine Devieilhe.

Le Comte Ory tells the story of a libidinous and cunning nobleman who disguises himself first as a hermit and then as a nun ("Sister Colette") in order to gain access to the virtuous Countess Adele, whose brother is away at the Crusades. The 2011 Met production was directed by the Tony Award-winning Broadway director Bartlett Sher, who in recent years has also staged Il barbiere di Siviglia and Les Contes d'Hoffman for the Met. Sher presented the action as an opera within an opera, updated the action by a few centuries and giving the costume designer, Catherine Zuber, the opportunity to create some particularly extravagant headgear.

In this performance of Handel's best-loved oratorio, conductor Christopher Hogwood returns to the original performance traditions. The choruses are sung by boy trebles and male altos, tenors and basses, and member of the Choir of Westminster Abbey. The soloists improvise embellishments in the arias and, in certain cases, join in the singing of the choruses - just as they would have done 240 years ago. In addition, Members of the Academy all play instruments of the period or accurate modern copies.

Rodelinda is a tale of unrequited love steeped in jealousy, treachery and grief. Jean-Marie Villegier's stylish production of Rodelinda sets Handel's tale of royal exile and fidelity in this silent movie era. The composer's ravishing music is perfectly set off by the sophisticated glamour and visual daring that characterized the birth of cinema.

An opera with a rich vein of musical ideas; sumptuous and original sets; a little-known German Romantic composer; high-level interpreters (among them Anna Caterina Antonacci, a star of international renown): these are the ingredients of Hans Heiling, staged in 2004 in Cagliari under the scrupulous and refined baton of Renato Palumbo. There is no doubt that this timeless story of gnomes and spirits, love and suffering, supernatural powers and mortal beauty will captivate many opera lovers.

Filmed in High Definition in Amsterdam on Toto's 25th Anniversary Tour in 2003, this stunning concert captures the band at their very best, reunited with original vocalist Bobby Kimball. The set combines all their hits with tracks from their latest album Â"Through The Looking Glass and other live favorites, performed in front of a wildly enthusiastic sell-out crowd.

La Cenerentola is one of the few operas to have an important subtitle, "The Triumph of Virtue". This Salzburg production makes a point of its being a moral tale rather than a mere fairy tale like the version reflexively sung by Angelina in her "Cavatina": the defeat and forgiveness of the stepsisters and their greedy father is a settling of moral accounts. The production is also tremendous fun–partly because of gimmicks like the mechanical coach and horses that arrives on stage in the high wind of the Act Two storm–but mostly because of the endlessly energetic pulse of Riccardo Chailly's conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic.

Fast, funny and furious, Rossini's "Il barbiere di Siviglia" boasts a torrent of sparkling music, while John Cox's production - sometimes outrageously boisterous, sometimes subtly inventive - adds its own distinctive lustre to this comic masterpiece. Rossini's most popular opera tells the story of a flightly young ward, the jealous old guardian who wishes to marry her and the romantic aristocratic young lover who, with the assistance of the local barber and several clever disguises, carries her off from under her guardian's nose. American soprano Maria Ewing excels as a bewitching Rosina, and John Rawnsley gives a virtuoso performance as the witty barber, Figaro.

The libretto, by Henri Meilac and Ludovic Halévy, is based on a novella by Prosper Mérimée. The first performance of Carmen on 3 March 1875, produced such a hostile reaction that Bizet left Paris physically and psychologically ill, and died only three months later on 3 June 1875, following two serious heart attacks. The massive scandal of the premiere may have been partially the result of Bizet’s attempt to reform the Opéra Comique genre, yet it must still be said that Carmen is operatic history’s most famous example of a failure being corrected by the passage of time: Carmen is now one of the most frequently performed operas in the world.

This Glyndebourne Festival Opera production of Rossini's version of the story of Cinderella is an exciting mixture of comedy, pathos, coloratura fireworks and masquerade. Starring Kathleen Kuhlmann, Laurence Dale, Marta Taddei, and Laura Zannini.

“One can share in a more carefree expression of joy here. Many fine conductors have presided over these traditional Strauss tributes, but none with such élan as the late Carlos Kleiber. The music swings and sways in terpsichorean ecstasy. Kleiber appears blissful as he inscribes elegant arcs with his baton, and the players beam.” (Gramophone)

Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Monteverdi Choir, Choeur du Théâtre du Châtelet and Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique in a landmark recording of Berlioz's towering opera. A tragic tale of love and fate, war and peace and the intertwined destinies of two cities, the opera is based on Virgil's imperial vision of the founding myth of Rome. The American tenor Gregory Kunde as Aeneas and the Italian soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci lead an international cast in this stunning production.

The overwhelming success of the Prague performance of Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) in December 1786, led to the commissioning of a new opera. Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte turned to the Don Juan theme, making this promising material the basis for their new opera. In the spring of 1787 Mozart began to compose it in Vienna, and was able to complete it in Prague by the autumn of the same year. Don Giovanni received its first performance, under the composer’s personal direction, on 20 October 1787 at Prague’s Count Nostitz National Theatre. This production of Don Giovanni at the Zurich Opera House was staged by the highly creative team of conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, director Jürgen Flimm and set-designer Erich Wonder. Rodney Gilfry and Cecilia Bartoli lead a first-class group of singers.

Leonard Bernstein was slated to conduct the entire set of these piano concertos. At the time of his death, however, he had completed the third, fourth and fifth concertos only. In tribute to Bernstein, Krystian Zimerman and the Vienna Philharmonic recorded the remaining concertos without a conductor.