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.

The production that emerged was a vast, big-budget throwback, an opera done up in a style of filmmaking that had reached its zenith some six decades ago.If the evening was entertaining, it was due more to its dream cast of principals and the monumental musical direction of Daniel Barenboim than the staging’s slavish celebration of spectacle

In each of the past four seasons the Deutsche Oper has managed to bring at least one new work to the stage.Of those works, which have included new operas from Aribert Reimann and Georg Friedrich Haas, Heart Chamber is perhaps the most conspicuously challenging, both in its logistical demands and in its composer’s restless determination to avoid the easy paths of musical and dramatic expression