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.

In Morton Feldman's lengthy 1979 piece "Violin and Orchestra", neither violin nor orchestra behaves as they do in the standard concerto format.

The news that OperaUpClose were planning to stage Verdi’s A Masked Ball in an IKEA store did not sound promising, as we’d been there before. In 2009 Flatpack Opera made Wembley IKEA the venue and subject of a work whose audience was joined by bemused shoppers, not all of whom were keen to be plunged into an art event which began in the bedsit department and ended in kitchens. At least OperaUpClose were doing it in a kosher theatre.

Ever since she made history by winning the BBC Musician of the Year contest at the age of twelve, Jennifer Pike has been setting a furious pace as a performer, while maintaining a healthy academic balance.