Scottish director David McVicar’s importance to Opera Australia – after his acclaimed Don Giovanni in 2014 – grows with this new production of his Covent Garden Faust, which is currently being seen in Sydney. The production dates back to 2004. The London opening night, which I attended, was a starry occasion, with Antonio Pappano in the pit and five internationally renowned principals: Roberto Alagna, Angela Gheorghiu, Bryn Terfel, Simon Keenlyside, and Sophie Koch. The Sydney production, much anticipated, was every bit as good.

McVicar shifts the opera from Goethe’s sixteenth-century Germany to nineteenth-century France. The new conception is fluent, coherent, and sympathetic. Charles Edwards’s stylish sets look inevitably cramped on the Sydney stage, but this never becomes disruptive.