To celebrate their 40th anniversary, Andrew Parrott and his Taverner Consort & Players have aptly chosen to record the first great operatic masterwork, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo.

Featuring the jazz trumpeter accompanied by orchestra on pieces written by himself and/or collaborator Martin Fondse, Eric Vloeimans' Evensong is another album poised on the increasingly blurred cusp of classical and jazz.

Best known for his interpretations of Schubert and Strauss lieder, young German tenor Daniel Behle here offers a programme of Bach cantatas arranged for flute and small ensemble, ranging from the lengthy, sombre da capo aria "Wo Wird in Diesem Jammertale" to the rippling flood of animated melisma that is "So Schnell ein Rauschend Wasser Schießt".

Stephen Fry has been named as the curator of an annual opera festival. The actor and comedian will take the helm at this year’s Deloitte Ignite festival which will explore the work of composers Verdi and Wagner.

Germany today celebrated the 200th birthday of Richard Wagner, the 19th-century composer whose music has been hailed as sublime art at the height of Western culture even as he remains tainted by his visceral anti-Semitic views, which later found favour with the Nazis.

Who could take the plot of La donna del lago seriously? Probably not even its first audience in Naples.

Glyndebourne productions which put Glyndebourne itself on stage are nothing new, but for Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos director Katharina Thoma has harnessed a strand of history which has hitherto gone unremarked. In 1940, with opera off the menu, Glyndebourne became a reception centre for evacuee children.

ENO's new production of Berg's 1925 opera draws parallels with servicemen's lives in Afghanistan

Female artists have sung Winterreise before, but not with the intensity of mezzo-soprano Alice Coote.

The opera venue's act will be honoured at this year's festival reports Jessica Duchen.

Wozzeck, Coliseum, London

Verdi's most powerful drama packs a punch in a revival of Nicholas Hytner's production with an all-star cast

The annual Lufthansa Festival launches at St Johns Smith Square with some brilliant Handel

The haunting Spanish lilt of its first movement betrays the composer's anti-war sympathies in Britten's Violin Concerto Op 15, written in the late 1930s; the looming shadow of a larger war is then discernible in the tuba lurking behind the gay violin and piccolo of the second movement. But it's the way that James Ehnes closes the opening movement that most impresses, essaying a gossamer thread of such subtlety it becomes almost transparent.

On Hidden Handel, Ann Hallenberg investigates rarely performed arias by Handel as substitutions or additions to existing works.