Gianandrea Noseda

Louise Alder’s gorgeous lyric soprano voice along with her keen intelligence and poise as a performer have brought her to the attention of some of the world’s leading opera companies. She talks to Andrew Green about her plans for a summer of Mozart opera in the heart of the English countryside

Gianandrea Noseda is a conductor who likes to see the world differently. His cool, elegant northern Italian exterior hides a restless thirst for knowledge, and a curiosity about life that informs every note of music that he plays. Ashutosh Khandekar met the maestro in Turin, where he is music director of Teatro Regio, an opera house that has undergone an extraordinary transformation under Noseda’s no-nonsense regime

The vast coastline of the Mediterranean Sea, known as the cradle of Western civilisation, continues to exert a powerful influence on Europe’s cultural life, especially in the summer months when the ancient theatres and historic monuments along its shores come to life with performances of opera. Opera Now picks some of the Mediterranean highlights of the summer months ahead

The Maltese island of Gozo may be tiny, but it punches far above its weight in making a significant contribution to the culture of the Mediterranean. As the Aurora Theatre celebrates 40 years of opera, conductor Colin Attard, a key figure in Gozo’s cultural renaissance, explains how the island’s musical life has grown into an international phenomenon

Move over Plácido… Opera Now’s contributors put their heads together to choose their favourite tenors from a new generation of rising stars

For Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho, singing has proved to be a kind of therapy which allows her to unleash her deepest emotions. No wonder she has been moving audiences to tears with her portrayal of tragic women in the world’s leading opera houses. Amanda Holloway finds the singer in a soulful mood

Professor Anthony Ogus heads to Germany’s heartland with a tick-list of opera houses to visit. On this occasion, he finds just two palpable hits and two disappointing misses among a group of operas by 20th-century composers who struggled under Nazi oppression

Work in progress

David T Little and Royce Vavrek’s savage, rockinfused Dog Days of 2012 was a revelation. Their absorbing new work, JFK, is at once grander and more intimate. Scored for traditional forces, it does away with conventional narrative and instead dramatises the inexorability of fate along with the inner lives of its characters