L'heure espagnole compares the wound-up mechanism of a clock with the erotic compulsions driving flesh-and-blood humans, with Concepción devising a complex sequence of moves and counter-moves to conceal the presence of her various admirers. While L'enfant et les sortileges shares a child's-eye view of a sometimes threatening world where inanimate objects come to life when a child, fed up with doing his homework, throws a temper tantrum.

L'heure espagnole compares the wound-up mechanism of a clock with the erotic compulsions driving flesh-and-blood humans, with Concepción devising a complex sequence of moves and counter-moves to conceal the presence of her various admirers. While L'enfant et les sortileges shares a child's-eye view of a sometimes threatening world where inanimate objects come to life when a child, fed up with doing his homework, throws a temper tantrum.

Perhaps no opera is as closely and affectionately associated with a single house as Le nozze di Figaro is with Glyndebourne. Effortlessly witty yet shot through with pain and sadness, this deeply ambivalent day in the life of masters and servants as they scheme and outwit one another was Glyndebourne's opening production in 1934. Michael Grandage's staging ist eh seventh, set in a louche Sixties ambiance. Marshaled by the 'ideal pacing' of Robin Ticciati, a youthful cast of principals has 'no weak link' and 'looks gorgeous' (The Sunday Times) in a production that continues Glyndebourne's rewarding history of engagement with Mozart's and Da Ponte's 'day of madness'.

In Glyndebourne's first-ever staging of an opera by Rameau, director Jonathan Kent presents a production which, in his own words, 'strives to appeal to every sense and show audiences how engrossing and musically ravishing French Baroque opera can be'. Rameau's inventive take on Racine's great tragedy Phèdre is brought to life by Paul Brown's colourful and elegant designs and Ashley Page's playful choreography. Ed lyon and Christiane Karg give captivating performances as the titular young lovers, while Sarah Connolly, making a welcome return to Glyndebourne, 'invests Phaedra with both grandeur and a desperately human vulnerability' (The Independent). Leading exponent of early music William Christie 'sets an exhilarating pace, galvanising the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to playing of tremendous panache' (The Daily Telegraph).

Olga Busuioc's 'performance of sustained dramatic intensity and vocal brilliance, brings direction and shape to the Miskimmon 'concept,' in a Festival-premiere revived from the 2016 tour. The Guardian lauds her reading's 'perception of clarity, dispassionate, yet full of heart, sensuously and expertly played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the eagerly responsive baton of Omer Meir Wellber.'

It tells the story of Orphée's descent into the Underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice. His singing has the power to overcome the guardian Furies, but the path of true love is shadowed by sorrow and tragedy. As a true 'drama of the soul' with intense psychological and emotive power, the show shook enlightenment Europe to its core.

Based on real events and drawing on Georg Büchner's revolutionary play, Alban Berg's Wozzeck turns a grimly tragic narrative of violence and murder into one of the most powerful and original operas of the 20th century. Berg's uncompromising portrayal of brutality and madness generated much controversy, but the significance of Wozzeck was soon recognised; its compelling lyrical expansiveness, large-scale dramatic gestures and remarkable musical structures producing music of overwhelming emotional intensity.

Director Katharina Thoma sets Richard Strauss's comedy in a country house in the South Downs, immediately before and during the Second World War. The librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthals' conceit, that a hapless young composer has to accept the simultaneous performance of his new tragic opera with a burlesque from a commedia dell'arte troupe, is turned into a touching wartime drama of nurses, invalids, airmen and of painful delusions and soul-searching, before final happiness.

• DVD 1(75 min.). Prologue
• Act 1
• DVD 2 (98 min.). Acts 2-3, Epilogue.

The opera is based on a play by the writers Jules Barbier, who wrote the opera's libretto, and Michel Carre. The play takes the real life German poet, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and makes him a character in some of his own, fanciful stories. Offenbach's drama follows the same scheme, placing the title character into three, fanciful stories of failed love.

• Bonus features: Post-war Britten : the history of Lucretia ; Innocence corrupted : a conversation with Fiona Shaw ; Cast gallery.

Enjoy Britten's first chamber opera that offers emotional power and physical beauty with realised staging and superb singing.

During his years in Italy. Handel absorbed the music of his contemporaries and mastered new stylistic trends. Though the staging of to resurrezione was a memorable event in the Roman musical world, it was the production of Agrippina that marked Handel₂s definitive investiture as an operatic composer. It met with enormous success and an unprecedented number of performances followed. Its melodic power is overwhelming and in his creation of credible and vivid characters.

With his affinity for the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini's advocacy of artistic and personal freedom, Hector Berlioz went straight for the grand gesture with his first completed opera. The plot revolves around Cellini's wooing of Teresa, a match frustrated at every opportunity by his rival, the cowardly Fieramosca. Benvenuto Cellini is a work combining romance, excitement, violence, comedy and spectacle; the perfect stage for Terry Gilliam's stylishly colorful and larger-than-life directing.