Cargill wraps her sumptuous voice around the curves of Berlioz's song cycle in a performance of extraordinary musical delicacy, poetic sensitivity and emotional range.

First seen as part of a 1912 double bill, Ariadne auf Naxos was revised and reshaped as Europe plunged into the carnage of the First World War. Strauss was profoundly relieved when his son, Franz, was declared unfit for military service. But his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, had already served as a reservist when the now familiar version of their backstage comedy on high and low art premiered in Vienna in 1916, four days after the assassination of the prime minister in the dining room of a hotel a few minutes' walk from the opera house.

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".

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.

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.

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