After nearly six months without a new production, two arrived at once at the Royal Opera House.Strictly speaking, neither of these shows were exactly premieres (both having been staged previously at continental festivals), but they felt like a gust of spring air after the bleak mid-winter of solid revivals and high-profile cancellations that have characterised the current season.

As Trudier Harris has pointed out, Morrison’s use of suppressed popular communicative forms – visual, oral, musical, and more – is an integral part of her uncovering “discredited” knowledge (Morrison’s deployment of the folk traditional-bearers and the transmission of popular memory, by Trudier Harris).

Red Priest is a baroque quartet with a difference: they present a very visual performance in addition to a lively musical impact.The Old Music Festival in Barcelona, close to its 30th birthday, is commencing a two-fold recreation of itself by including this, so called, crossover quartet in its program which hopes to attract new fans in its new location, the Barcelona Auditorium.

Il burbero di buon cuore, the first production in a series of successful collaborations between Lorenzo Da Ponte and Vicente Martín y Soler, was the result—we are told—of a suggestion made by Emperor Joseph II himself as patron of the Italian opera in Vienna.