One emerged from the auditorium slightly battered, and with a bad taste in the mouth;which, one suspects, was Mr Kosky’s goal.If parts of the staging leaned in the direction of excess, much of the music was notable for its restraint.

Between a superb ensemble cast and Daniel Barenboim’s perfectly-judged musical direction, it was a thrilling opening to the Staatsoper’s new season

For its first run of live performances, the production benefitted from both the buzz of a real audience and a generally superior cast to that of the première.Vincent Huguet’s staging, however, remained aggressively bland and perplexingly uninspired, a triumph of sets and costumes over ideas and characters.

The same sphinx-like impenetrability presided over the Berlin Philharmonic’s season opening concert, which featured a trio of wonderful pieces given performances of equal brilliance.In the overture to Weber’s Oberon, in the restless Scherzo of Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses, and in nearly every moment of Schubert’s ‘Great’ C-Major Symphony one was never allowed to forget the insistence of the rhythm.

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.