Given that Ann Widdecombe spent her prime promoting Victorian attitudes to abortion and homosexuality, you could argue she has some atoning to do, and her self-reinvention certainly makes a start.

Passions are running high among the oppressed populace, and a weak colonial administrator decides to appease the angry crowd by throwing them a celebrated rebel as a sacrifice.

Red Holloway, a tenor saxophone player who had a tone as big as the side of a house, made his name in jazz, but more quietly – or musically, more loudly – worked for John Mayall and a variety of rhythm'n'blues stars. "I enjoyed playing with Mayall," Holloway said. "He's a very good self-taught entertainer and I admire that. It takes an awful lot of nerve and perseverance to become successful like he did... We had a good working relationship."

Workshopping is all the rage in experimental opera at present, and Tete a tete - with a distinguished history of making magic with limited means – has workshopped Circus Tricks in a wide variety of contexts, with numerous transformations.

Channel 4's four-year £15m deal for marquee races is apt reward for its passionate approach

Things do not look good for Anne Truelove. "No word from Tom," she sings, while her beloved vanishes to London, led astray by the sinister Nick Shadow. That is just the start of her problems. Stravinsky's neoclassical masterpiece, The Rake's Progress, concludes with a heartbreaking scene in which Anne sings her Tom a lullaby as he dies by inches in the lunatic asylum of Bedlam.

The character singer Charles Anthony, who set the record for most appearances at the Metropolitan Opera – 2,928 – during a career that spanned from 1954 to 2010, died on 15 February at the age of 82.

Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann is a long and convoluted work which usually comes over as an implausible amalgam of Faust and Coppelia.

With German Christmas markets springing up like mushrooms in British cities, it was appropriate that the Armonico Consort should present a seventeenth-century musical complement.

Salvaged from an unfinished three-part oratorio originally titled "Earth, Heaven & Hell", the two sections of Mendelssohn's "Christus" deal with the Nativity and the Passion, jumping abruptly from birth to betrayal with no intervening exposition.

In 2002, 24 year-old Joseph Calleja made his UK debut in Welsh National Opera's Oval Office staging of Rigoletto.

The Royal Albert Hall can be an intimate place, mysteriously transforming on occasions from monster auditorium to private salon.

A huge success at the Royal Opera House last year in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, Joseph Calleja understandably includes his standout aria from that production, "Sento avvampar nell'anima", on this latest collection, along with plenty of Puccini and a series of French heroic roles from Offenbach's Hoffman, Massenet's Manon and Bizet's Pearl Fishers, in all of which he shows no cramping of his natural bel canto style by the French line, finding plenty of room to manoeuvre.

Accompanied by the voices and period instruments of the Theatre of Early Music, celebrated countertenor Daniel Taylor here presents a collection of songs drawn from, or influenced by, Shakespeare, composed by the likes of Gibbons, Purcell and Dowland.