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A Rossini comedy should sparkle, but this new production, starting its tour from Hackney, is decidedly lacking bubbles.

Donizetti’s tale of one the Italian Renaissance’s objects of hate is well sung and superbly acted in ETO's new spring tour production.

A fine cast breathes life into the story of the captured Ottoman Sultan Bajazet and his Mongol conqueror.

A revival of James Conway's staging of Ottone launches English Touring Opera's autumn season of three Handel operas. 

Rimsky-Korsakov's anti-tsarist satirical fairytale makes for an entertaining rarity in ETO's spring tour.

English Touring Opera has revived James Conway's production of La bohème to launch the company back to full operations post-lockdown. What this new run lacks in finesse is made up for in bags of heart and spirit.

It sizzles with energy, fizzes with musical delight and rejoices in an understated sense of fun. Conway gives the work’s incongruities free rein and defies the audience not to chuckle.

James Conway's production for English Touring Opera returns in a trimmed-down, single-evening guise. 

It is clear that these women are already ripe for plucking even before Don Alfonso unleashes his dastardly plan.

Weill's satirical fairytale bites just as hard today as it did in 1933.

English Touring Opera open their autumn season with the first of two Singspiels. 

A fine cast, orchestra and production make English Touring Opera's new production of Verdi's Macbeth a must see. 

A direct and expressive new production of one of Mozart's most adventurous operas enthrals at the Hackney Empire. 

Rossini's Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra is a hard work to love and English Touring Opera's new production which launched at the Hackney Empire Theatre struggled to make a case for regular outings.

English Touring Opera's triple bill of early Baroque miniatures promised an intruiging evening but failed up to expectations. 

Immersive, direct and passionate Bach from English Touring Opera and the Old Street Band.

English Touring Opera’s new Radamisto took time to settle down on opening night.

ETO's production of Mozart's nuptial comedy, being performed in towns across the country, lacks depth but has some terrific singing with a particularly fine Susanna from Rachel Redmond.

A great return appearance for English Touring Opera's Puccini double bill opening its spring tour at the Hackney Empire.

ETO's extracts from Rossini's serious operas at the Hackney Empire lacked spark and dynamism, but saw a fine showing from Elena Xanthoudakis and Catherine Carby.

Conway's decision to render Handel's epic in its entirety was let down by a static staging and unnecessary repeats that masked the hidden gem-like arias.

A searing examination of love in a time war is to be found in a new production and new edition of Rameau's greatest work.

A joyous explosion of tuneful Victorian satire provides an unlikely, yet ideal, contrast to English Touring Opera's Tosca as their Patience tours the UK in this finely-cast, period-perfect production.

Blanche McIntyre's new production for ETO proves a disappointment, saddled with a trip hazard of a set. 

ETO's charactistically clear, simple production conveys Homer's story with clarity, confidence, and charm – and even humour – from a fine cast, making an exciting start to fully-staged opera at Saffron Hall. 

Clever staging and a high standard of acting does much to happily while away the three hours of this baroque opera in the second of ETO's Baroque extravaganza.

Updating 470BC Abydos to a 1940s RAF base complete with tin hangar and outdoor privy seemed at times more Dad’s Army than a particularly cohesive tale of war and love.

English Touring Opera gives Gluck's reformist masterpiece a suitably blood-spattered outing in a production which keeps the opera in touch with its classical roots. 

Wonderful singing and playing liven up a slightly lifeless staging of Mozart's turbulent masterpiece. 

Donizetti's back catalogue proves just as rich as his well-loved works, with this blisteringly good foray into an extraordinary opera whose UK premiere is 179 undeserved years late. 

A superbly-sung title role from Ed Ballard is the best part of this otherwise patchy, well-sung but ultimately unmoving Werther from English Touring Opera. 

Fine orchestral and singing performances in ETO's Pelléas et Mélisande aren't enough to overcome some of the work's difficulties.

James Conway’s production of La bohème may be a little restrained on banter, but hits all the emotional high notes, is compellingly played and superbly sung. 

Donizetti’s Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo hasn’t strayed onto UK shores for decades, but is given a spirited performance by English Touring Opera. 

Written half a century before the verismo movement, Donizetti paints a true-to-life portrait of a besieged people which is genuinely touching. James Conway's straightforward production features some notable individual singers and an excellent performance by the chorus.

A beautiful and much-put-upon princess, a pair of royal lovers who have never met, a scheming mother, and a pirate who is a prince in disguise: Ottone is a feast of ideas, beauty and fun. 

Few composers deal in genial wit better than Joseph Haydn, so it was baffling that his opera buffa Il mondo della luna left me so grumpy in this English Touring Opera production. 

English Touring Opera's production of Mozart's The Magic Flute launches in Hackney, balanced more towards fun than profundity, with some stunning coups de théâtre.

Paul Bunyan is something of an oddity in Benjamin Britten’s oeuvre; a satirical operetta (with a libretto by W.H. Auden) about pioneers in America who are led by a gigantic lumberjack. 

English Touring Opera take Tippett’s powerful pacifist retelling of Homer’s Iliad on tour in a strong, beautifully designed production, directed by James Conway, which will leave hearts and minds in turmoil.

Agrippina was a force to be reckoned with: the granddaughter, sister, niece, wife and mother of four Roman Emperors (and lover, incestuously, of at least two). As Mary Beard points out in her brilliant programme introduction, “Agrippina was probably the best connected woman that the Roman world ever saw” – and one of the most ruthless.

“... and as Venice in many things surpasses all places else where I have been, so are these Operas the most excellent of all its glorious Vanities.” So wrote the entranced English traveller Richard Bargrave in 1655. These days, however, Venice travels to England in the form of the English Touring Opera’s 2013 autumn season production.

When the Baroque movement in art ended, the backlash was severe. The very adjective became an insult: the cold, clear, rarefied eye of 18th-century Neoclassicism found its opulence stifling, its luxury oppressive, and its profusion of ornament, ugly.

A very concise, two-act opera which tells a bleak wartime tale of sacrifice, rarely performed and never realised to the satisfaction of its own composer. You could be forgiven for thinking I was describing something from 20th-century Germany, perhaps an expressionist work taking after Berg’s Wozzeck or similar. You’d be wrong.

English Touring Opera’s Verdi title for their Spring season in this composer’s (and Wagner’s) anniversary year is one of no small ambition. Premièred to only modest success in Venice in 1857, it would take Verdi another 20 or so years to return to Simon Boccanegra to try to fix the old “wobbly table” (as he and his librettist, Boito, later dubbed the 1857 version).

Mozart’s Così fan tutte is a comic opera filled with deceit, disguises and betrayal, all carried along by a breathtaking score and witty lyrics. What better way to start ETO’s Spring 2013 season than with a new rendering of this timeless work, in a brilliantly clever English translation by Martin Fitzpatrick.

With its small raised platform and steeply seated audience, the Linbury Studio Theatre was an auspicious venue for the English Touring Opera’s production of Peter Maxwell Davies’ chamber opera The Lighthouse (1979). The trelliswork of metal bars encircling the stalls and the bleak lighting effects gave this performance a befittingly industrial air.

“Community, exclusion, rejection and desire”, writes director Christopher Rolls about English Touring Opera’s production of Albert Herring. “Doesn’t sound like a recipe for an uproarious comedy does it? And the key thing about Herring is that it is very very funny.

When Emperor Überall decrees an all-pervasive war that will result in the death of his whole population, Death takes umbrage at the fact that his job is being usurped and, in the mother of all demarcation disputes, goes on strike.

Eugene Onegin is one of the greatest of all operas, both musically and dramatically: Tchaikovsky's temperament and compositional proclivities find in the libretto the perfect characters and subject matter such that his particular genius is allowed to flourish and bloom, more fully and voluptuously than he ever managed before or after in the genre of opera.