In April of last year, the Deutsche Oper announced that their new production of 'Das Rheingold', the first installment in Stefan Herheim’s highly anticipated new 'Ring Cycle', would have to be postponed.

Staatsoper’s new production of 'La Fanciulla del West' was an unexpected delight.Although it featured three strong principals and a reasonably focussed staging, its persuasive energy came primarily from the eruptions of orchestral emotion.

Although Luca Francesconi’s Quartett production had undoubtedly been scheduled long before the first wave of the COVID pandemic, the opera, a claustrophobic and occasionally harrowing adaptation of Heiner Müller’s stage play of the same name, had an edge of lockdown madness that made it especially timely.

Although many of the images in this Walküre may have drawn on conceptual threads from Mr Herheim’s yet-unseen Rheingold, the staging stood admirably on its own.Regardless of whether or not the suitcases were the continuation of an element from Rheingold, they did an excellent job of mirroring the sense of desperate flight that pervades the opera: Siegmund from his pursuers, Siegmund and Sieglinde from Hunding, Brünnhilde from Wotan, Wotan from Fricka and the inevitability of his End.

During the darkest days of the COVID pandemic’s first wave, however, Igor Levit also became one of the great folk-heroes of the lockdown thanks to a series of mini-recitals broadcast via his Twitter account.

There was no question that it was great to hear Mozart performed once again by a live orchestra in a real auditorium, but the concert nonetheless seemed more a tentative step than a triumphant return, as though both audience and orchestra were finding their respective bearings in a world that had lost some of its reassuring familiarity.

Great popularity comes great responsibility, a fact which André Heller’s new Rosenkavalier for the Staatsoper seemed unable to forget.It was undoubtedly a production of the highest quality, beautiful to look at and directed with tasteful subtlety;

Jens-Daniel Herzog, whose new production opened recently at Dresden’s Semperoper, did not seem especially interested in arguments.His willingness to unearth interesting themes only to leave them unexplored resulted in a staging with a lot of wonderful set-up and a frustrating lack of follow-through.