Ballet: I went to see the Royal Ballet's 'Giselle' at the Royal Opera House. My fiancé, Thiago Soares, was playing Count Albrecht with Mara Galeazzi as Giselle. It was a wonderful performance. I loved every minute of it. The whole company was brilliant and the production is fantastic in every way. It's one of my favourites to watch and dance.

The Prisoners’ Chorus in ‘Fidelio’ is one of the great moments in opera. After years in the dark, the grey-faced multitude are suddenly released from their cells and stumble out into the light.

David McVicar's darkly primitivist Aida was a necessary antidote to the whole tedious tradition of sub-De Mille spectacle in this piece.

Opera is gearing up for a David and Goliath battle as a production first performed to 35 people in a pub takes on the collaborative might of five international companies at the stage's answer to the Oscars. Opera UpClose's La Bohème is nominated alongside Adriana Lecouvreur, lavishly staged at the 2,200-seat Royal Opera House, in the best new opera production category at next Sunday's Olivier Awards.

Exactly one week after the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra memorably presented key players in a chamber setting, Antonio Pappano has done likewise with his Royal Opera House Orchestra – and what’s more found a common denominator. You go years without hearing the single surviving movement of Mahler’s early Piano Quartet and then, like buses, two arrive together.

After the epic inanities of Mike Figgis’s cinematic take on ‘Lucrezia Borgia’ at the Coliseum - whose only saving grace was a trio of superb voices - it was sweet relief to encounter David McVicar’s ‘Magic Flute’ at Covent Garden. McVicar may have his own way of going over the top, but in this classic production, now in its third revival, he doesn’t put a foot wrong.

Those umbilically-joined directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier don’t always hit the spot – their ‘Hansel und Gretel’ is a queasy concoction – but when they do, the results are glorious, and never more so than with their take on Rossini’s ‘Il barbiere di Siviglia’, now back for its second revival.

Snow is falling, this time on stage. Frederick Ashton's ballet Les Patineurs shows skaters at play, showing off or slipping on the ice. When the snow starts to fall, they react as people do react: they look up, reach out to touch it, rush into a new round of activity, a whirl of movement.