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Luscious orchestral and choral sounds bring Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé to shimmering life.

Welsh National Opera's co-production of Kiss me, Kate is another good argument for opera companies to stage Broadway musicals.

André Tchaikowsky's version of The Merchant of Venice combines his love of Shakespeare with his recollections of a harsh childhood as a Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto.

David Jones' First World War epic poem comes to musical life in Iain Bell's newly-commissioned opera. 

Sondheim's Sweeney Todd seen and heard as it is: one of the greatest late-20th-century operas. 

With Lawrence Zazzo's spectacular counter-tenor voice, Handel's Orlando finds an ideal interpreter.

Federico Fellini’s underrated film Orchestra Rehearsal (Prova d’orchestra) was released in 1978, and told the story of an orchestra going on strike against its conductor.

A double bill at the Birgitta Festival staged Scheherazade and the Polovtsian Dances, both performed in costumes and on sets based on the original designs dating from around 1910.

A high-flying, zip-wire staging of Haydn's The Creation in Tallinn. 

Annilese Miskimmon's production of I puritani mixes Royalists with Loyalists - but is musically successful under Carlo Rizzi's baton.

Mélisande as Lulu in David Pountney's unfulfilling production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at Welsh National Opera. 

Piano duo Antoine Françoise and Robin Green perform a challenging, innovative and entertaining lunchtime recital.

Richard Ayres's Peter Pan, in a new WNO production, leaves J.M. Barrie's story dangling. 

Although technical problems threatened to undermine this production, Anja Harteros' Elsa and Klaus Florian Vogt's Lohengrin transcended all.

Barrie Kosky's production of Schoenberg's unfinished masterpiece is brought to musical life by Vladimir Jurowski's intense and compelling interpretation.

B Tommy Andersson's music promises more than it delivers in this showcase concert with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. 

Hansel and Gretel is often treated as a children's opera, suitable for family viewing at Christmas, but as Richard Jones' production demonstrates, it is a good deal darker than that.

Lothar Koenigs conducts a stylish, colourful Magic Flute inspired by Magritte. 

Thomas Søndergård's over-subtle touch in conducting Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart has some delicate colouring but fails to reach the deeper drama.

Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette attracted a large audience for a concert performance from Madrid, enticed by Roberto Alagna's Roméo.

Andrea De Rosa’s atmospheric production of Simon Boccanegra uses a series of landscapes projected onto a cyclorama to evoke the Gulf of Genoa. 

BBC National Orchestra of Wales's afternoon concert series brings unusual works to light, but the small auditorium can make some of the heavier late-romantic orchestration overwhelming – to the point of being overpowering.

The Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff celebrates its 10th anniversary this autumn, and as part of the celebrations the Mariinsky Opera, under its conductor Valery Gergiev, was invited back for a concert performance of Prokofiev’s comic opera, Betrothal in a Monastery.

A colour-coded Mosè in Egitto uses the paintings of Marc Chagall to inspire the costumes for the Jews and the Egyptians in this production of a Rossinian rarity.

Welsh National Opera's new production of Rossini's William Tell shows off orchestra and chorus to their full under Carlo Rizzi's baton

The Birgitta Festival is an interesting annual venture put on by the city of Tallinn, and in 2014 it completes its tenth year. The festival is held in the ruined Convent of St Birgitta, set back from Tallinn Bay and on the banks of the River Pirita. 

Leoš Janáček’s career as an opera composer was an unusual one. Unlike Verdi, who wrote successful operas throughout his life, and unlike Rossini, who retired from operatic composition in his late 30s, Janáček only came into his own as a composer of operas after the age of 50.

Anyone running a bar or a bistro, or providing music for a christening, a post-Ramadan party or a bar mitzvah, would have to go a long way to find more fitting and spirited music than that made by Jordi Savall and his sometimes merry, sometimes melancholy, band of minstrels.

The Merry Widow, performed on a summer evening in Vienna should be an unmissable treat - and it was.

Ariadne auf Naxos is the ideal Viennese opera: an entertainment by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal that satirises the relationship between composer and patron.

Nina Stemmes' glorious Brünnhilde crowns a towering performance of Götterdämmerung at the Vienna State Opera. 

Shadow puppet serpents and policemen in tutus: Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier's production of Die Zauberflöte is graced with a strong cast. 

How does Usher House stand up? Like the house, it doesn’t. Welsh National Opera's double bill based on The Fall of the House of Usher underwhelms.

Rudolf Frey's production of Nabucco for Welsh National Opera undercuts the solemnity and beauty of the opera, detracting from some fine performances. 

The recently-refurbished Opéra Royal de Wallonie dominates the Place de l’Opéra in the Belgian city of Liège, not only with its imposing columned portico but with its new fly-tower which rears above it.

Sometimes catching a performance with its second cast can be as revealing as attending a first night, and that was the case with this production of Rigoletto by the Canadian director Robert Carsen at La Monnaie in Brussels.

A riveting performance of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, despite the absence of the golden calf, the burning bush, Sodom and Gomorrah. 

If a giant played a tune on the cable stays of the Second Severn Crossing bridge, with its double span of fanned-out suspension wires, it would sound like a basso-profondo version of the kora. 

The joy of listening to Brahms’s piano concertos in a concert hall – especially one with such fine acoustics as St David’s Hall, Cardiff – is that textures and harmonies that can sound thick, muddy and ill-balanced in recordings come across with all their intricate, closely-woven contrapuntal writing clear and thrilling.