Sibelius

This year’s Jette Parker Artists showcase is a triple bill of modern-ish operas; a cleverly assembled trittico of one-acters, linked by a theme of bereavement. That sounds bleak until you consider that Puccini’s Trittico was originally inspired by The Divine Comedy, and who bothers about that today? Anyway, the three operas that make up Tales of Love and Loss are far from dispiriting in their overall effect. Like Puccini, Talia Stern – who directs all three – has gone for two tragedies plus a raucous, palate-cleansing comedy. And like Gianni Schicchi, the final laugh-fest (Elena Langer’s Four Sisters) plays out around a barely cold corpse and sends you into the night feeling uneasy, but undeniably entertained. The Puccini parallels stop there.

It’s the Edinburgh International Festival, and Barrie’s back in town. Once, Edinburgh was pretty much the only place that you could see Barrie Kosky directing in the UK; there was a satisfyingly transgressive thrill about an opera director whose priorities were so self-evidently about the whole art form that he’d happily stage Monteverdi as a tango-powered revue. In recent years, Baz the Knife has supplied increasingly rare moments of discovery amid the EIF’s all-you-can-eat buffet of touring orchestras and reheated prestige productions. But he’s not the rare bird he was. In fact, with a Carmen in rep at Covent Garden and a new London Rheingold coming soon after his Dialogues des Carmélites at Glyndebourne and the Proms, he’s starting to look like a fixture.