Through the eyes of French director Laurent Pelly, this expression of Berlioz's eternal admiration for the Bard—his adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing as a comic opera—becomes “an elegant treatise on love and music designed in shades of grey with 1950s costumes” (Sunday Express ★★★★). Housed by designer Barbara de Limburg in a series of oversized boxes, it is ‘terribly chic, terribly pretty’ (The Spectator).

Above the ‘warm and elegant playing of the London Philharmonic’, Paul Appleby sings “attractively” as Bénédict and Stéphanie d'Oustrac ‘plays a wonderfully energetic and passionate Béatrice, singing charmingly and acting enthusiastically’ (The Telegraph).