Opéra Magazine's top-rated recordings for September, October and November 2025

I was still on holiday in Greece when the latest two issues of France's Opéra Magazine arrived, so I found them in the pile of post waiting for me when I got home a couple of weeks ago.

The first was marked ‘Septembre 2025’ as normal. The second, marked ‘Octobre-Novembre 2025’, announced out of the blue, in its editorial, that ‘In order to provide you with more in-depth articles, more substantial investigations and richer information, we will now be publishing every two months.’ A cheeky bit of spin, I think, from a magazine that’s recently changed hands and, so I understand, since then lost or fired most of its staff.

Their ‘coup de coeur’ - i.e. their top pick - in September, with one of their special ‘Diamond’ awards, was Dido and Aeneas with Joyce DiDonato and Michael Spyres under Emelyanchev, dubbed a new ‘reference’ and ‘set to be seen as a landmark recording.’

It doesn't happen often, but their top pick in the October-November, again with one of their ‘Diamonds’, is a DVD set: Andreas Homoki’s Zurich production of the Ring, with - to name a few - Konieczny, Cutler, Vogt and Nylund under Noseda: ‘What a team at the service of Wagnerian drama !’