Richard Farnes led Opera North in a pulsating Salomé, and Villazon cut a dash in his debut as Werther.

By Hugh Canning [Times Online, 22 January 2006]

As the Grand Theatre in Leeds undergoes renovation, Opera North is spending the first half of its 2005-06 season giving concert performances and semi-stagings. The programme actually started at the end of last season, when Richard Farnes, the company’s dynamic young music director, conducted thrilling “staged” concerts of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle — with John Tomlinson as the eponymous world- and wife-weary Duke and Sally Burgess as his nosey spouse number four — before taking it into the studio for Chandos’s Opera-in-English series.