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Glorious, sparkling, full of dance variety, the heartbeats of every scene in which they appear, they’re figureheads whose inner lives remain unknown. According to her account, these often took place before their children and servants; Maria left him after an incident in which he began to throttle her and spit at her. While many of his Russian artist contemporaries (Dostoyevsky, Repin, Mussorgsky, Tolstoy, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov) were pursuing a cult of Russian subject matter for Russian people, Petipa kept looking to the west, pursuing art for art’s sake. Feminist Germaine Greer once argued that Shakespeare, in his comedy The Taming of the Shrew, gave to its tamed heroine Kate a final speech that’s “the greatest defence of Christian monogamy ever written”.

[...]in his hands the Czech Philharmonic is one of the world’s superlative orchestras. The orchestra excelled in judging special sound alchemies: a brief blend of harp and trombone in the piano concerto created a poetic frisson, while the spacious Modernist opening fanfare for brass and drums in the Glagolitic Mass spoke arrestingly of history and the universal. Ours is an era when the women composers of both past and present are newly honoured, but Kaprálová (1915-40) achieved much in her own short life, even conducting this sinfonietta at the Queen’s Hall, London, in 1938.

He’s a dangerously naughty man of the streets born for subversive clowning, with a bright-eyed cartoon face. Poppea is about mainly real events — the Roman emperor Nerone dumps wife one, Ottavia, for wife two, Poppea, sending waves through the court — but Monteverdi and his librettist, Giovanni Francesco Busenello, frame it like a Homeric epic, with deities (Fortune, Love, Virtue) introducing and observing the human events. The admirable Grange Festival cast, conducted by David Bates, makes every role keenly individual. Anna Bonitatibus, whose voice has such presence, makes a special impact as Ottavia (Nero’s ex) and Kitty Whately brings a disarming purity to Poppea, but Jonathan Lemalu’s Seneca is the most authoritative of all.