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The Lyric Opera’s new production of Rigoletto evokes visually the contours and high-contrast relief of a surrealist painting. 

The finale was the dramatic and musical high of the night, when both Ana María Martínez and Mariusz Kwiecień let themselves cut loose, laying waste to the bare stage.

The Lyric Opera’s new production of Carmen is lusciously embodied, with expressionistic splashes of colour against a quasi-modern backdrop. 

In the end, Newbury’s production leaves you with more questions than it answers. 

English conductor Nicholas McGegan led a responsible reading of Handel's now-classic oratorio, infusing some dramatic and lyrical touches into a largely unruffled evening.

Setting the opera in the backyard of a suburban house feels refreshingly honest: the ridiculous and simplistic tale of the evil witch, the prince and the maiden is rightfully returned to the arena of children's games, and adults look on indulgently, with a wink.

This production, directed by Tim Albery and with sets and costumes by Tobias Hoheisel, boasts more than one megastar.

Strong vocal talent rules the night, and a late moment of visual splendor caps off a serviceable reading of a battered warhorse.

If the production is full of pleasures, they do not immediately or obviously connect to a sense of some larger plan, which might have been helped along with a more dynamic set.

With clear direction and well-executed hits (such as the lush trio from the end of the third act), the show will appeal to those with nostalgia for the production and wish to escape the biting cold with the sound of strings warmed by horns.

The Lyric Opera put together the best-sounding première of the year so far, in which singers, chorus and the orchestra all began with astonishing confidence and only improved from there.

It is the fusion of textures and styles coming from the pit that gives Bel Canto a memorable musical profile.

Bringing out the unabashed colour and detail of the score, Andrew Davis delivered a superb reading in the pit, tightly coherent and with exemplary attentiveness to articulation. 

What makes this Figaro memorable and admirable is the way it manages both to be sprightly in its tone and details and also luxuriant in places that another director might have blown through.

The cast of young professionals seemed entirely at ease in Midsummer Night’s sometimes abstruse musico-mythical world, and made their surroundings work for them.

Cédric Tiberghien’s recital at Symphony Center on Sunday built up like a crescendo, rising to ever greater heights of contrast, color, and explosive energy.

David Pountney's production of Mieczysław Weinberg's opera The Passenger travels to Chicago. 

Amber Wagner sings Elisabeth with a deepened command and an access to a horizon of sound that make it seem as though her throat had found six more inches of release. It’s a phenomenal performance.

American tenor Brian Jagde is the standout in this Tosca, with just those notes of honey and throatiness that seem to wrap up an orchestra’s sound and deliver the whole package to your front door, no signature needed.

Vasily Petrenko and Paul Lewis – two young men, around 40 years apiece – joined forces at the CSO last week in a program of very mature works. 

American soprano Sondra Radvanovsky is the reason to see Anna Bolena, though the production provides plenty of other reasons to stay. 

The marriage between performers and score here is perfect, because Gershwin’s text-setting is near-miraculous, somehow every word is clear and seems to be naturally inflected by the curvature of the musical line.

The Il trovatore on offer at the Lyric this month would make a fine CD, its vocal strengths to be found equally among the leading foursome, but its weaknesses are visual and dramaturgical, and these are plenty too.

Late in the opera, in the calm that settles after a vaudeville of ballet dancers and Italian singers, Fleming’s poise pervades the Countess’s closing rumination over love and the nature of art. It’s a concert piece nestled in Capriccio’s narrative bustle, and to hear Fleming sing it is to be reminded of her talents as a communicator in music within and beyond the opera stage.

This production's consistent visual beauty forms the setting for this Don’s musical approach. It is a testament to this ensemble that Mariusz Kwiecień can’t steal the show in spite of his utterly commanding physical and vocal presence as the Don.

The Chicago Opera Theater pairs two one-act operas from 1943 - Viktor Ullmann's The Emperor of Atlantis and Carl Orff's The Clever One - in a program conducted by Francesco Milioto and directed by Andreas Mitisek.

Amanda Majeski and Joyce DiDonato are exceptional as Vitellia and Sesto in David McVicar's production of La clemenza di Tito at the Lyric Opera.

Ana María Martínez takes on the title role as Dvořák’s nymph Rusalka in a new Lyric Opera production by David McVicar.

The new Barber of Seville at the Lyric Opera, brought to life by the director Rob Ashford, set designer Scott Pask, and conductor Michele Mariotti, is not only intelligent and imaginative but also strings successions of images, gestures, and sung moments into truly satisfying large-scale forms.

The production of Die Fledermaus currently onstage at the Lyric Opera is smart, goofy and not too fussed about keeping all its parts under tight control.

The new Traviata at the Lyric Opera is both hyper-traditional and, in moments, saucily modern. In broad strokes, it looks like many another Traviata that has come before, though a twinge of visual ambition goes past such clichés.

What is perhaps even more remarkable than the unabashed grandeur of the new Parsifal at the Lyric Opera of Chicago is the degree to which its spectacle draws on the images and genres of 20th-century media technologies including popular music.

Chicago Lyric Opera's production of Madama Butterfly is open and airy, quiet in its theatrics, and the characters move with the grace and inevitability of shadows on the wall.

Amid red carpets and canapés, the Lyric Opera’s 2013/14 season opened on Saturday night with a work that perfectly suited the storm gathering above as ball-gowned luminaries swept into the hall: Verdi’s Otello, that late masterpiece of mood and terraced intensities.

Robert Wilson said, when preparing to stage Helmut Lachenmann’s deeply intricate and sensually vibrant opera Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, that he could not imagine staging it in a typical opera house. He could not have found a better hall than the Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum, a medium-sized town about an hour north-east of Düsseldorf and one of the host cities of this year’s Ruhrtriennale.

Usually, I don’t find much to be excited about in opera stagings meant to overhaul the genre, to give it the resuscitation it apparently needs. They are always more promising on paper, always less effective in execution: I’ve seen all kinds of sexual permissiveness, giant machines, film projections, even singing robots (an especially low point).

András Schiff and Hanno Müller-Brachmann make a perfect musical pair. On the one hand, Schiff, staunch lover of the old masters and one of the only pianists left on the circuit who will regularly do a Beethoven or a Well-Tempered Clavier cycle, is as unflashy as you like, moderate, serious.

Signs of birth and death – but moreso death – flash continuously through the Latvian director Viestur Kairish’s new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which opened the Komische Oper Berlin’s 2013/14 season.

If there were a gold medal for programming at Musikfest Berlin, it would go to last night’s concert with the RIAS Chamber Choir, Ensemble musikFabrik, and a host of other musicians, gathered under the baton of James Wood.

After Simon Rattle blazed into the Philharmonie last week with big hits like Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass, and (somewhat less of a big hit) Lutosławski’s Second Symphony, Alan Gilbert, normally to be found on a podium in front of the New York Philharmonic, returned with the same band on Thursday to play lesser-known pieces in the repertoire: Janáček’s violin

A few nights after the Berliner Philharmoniker brought us Janáček’s late masterpiece, the Glagolitic Mass, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and conductor Tugan Sokhiev took the stage with his other great work from the same year, 1926: the Sinfonietta, Op. 60, which originally appeared with the modifier “Military”.

A night drawn mostly from a gentler range of sounds, some more familiar, some stranger. Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra London brought classics from Debussy and Ravel to the Philharmonie in Berlin, and paired them with two works by Lutosławski: the intricate and incredible Third Symphony, and Les espaces du sommeil, something between a monodrama and a song accompanied by orchestra

After a week of big orchestras and big works, Musikfest Berlin took a breath by returning to the Kammermusiksaal at the midway mark of the festival.

If the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra is the Porsche of orchestras, then Mariss Jansons is something like the Michael Schumacher of conductors, guiding this most-celebrated of German radio orchestras through some of the most precipitous and heart-stopping shifts in speed I have witnessed.

The Berliner Philharmoniker may be the world’s business-savviest orchestra. From the handsome program booklets printed on thick, color-rich stock (3€ instead of the customary 2€), to the Sony-sponsored Digital Concert Hall (where one can buy “tickets” to access past and present BP videos), even down to the gold trim on my ticket, this orchestra amply demonstrates its awareness of its reputation as

Even in a festival anchored around a handful of 20th-century composers touched by the presence of war – Benjamin Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich, Béla Bartók, Witold Lutosławski – the program on Thursday night with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and their chief conductor, Marek Janowski, was especially haunted by the memory of atrocity. It was a night of tough music with little reprieve.

It is the rare concert for which one can say that each half of the program would have sufficed as the sole offering of the night; when each half contains personality, wisdom, a sense of history, life-risking music-making, and attractive and important repertoire.

The orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin and its conductor-in-chief, Donald Runnicles, made an appearance above stage level this week, performing a program of concert pieces at Musikfest Berlin a week before the opera season takes off.

As my seatmate remarked to me after the concert, it is strange and wonderful to hear Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich, who befriended each other late in life, begin to sound alike in their old age while remaining unmistakably themselves. I agreed.

Now this is how you put together a program of contrasts! Members of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, on this night anchored by the presence of Pierre-Laurent Aimard, led us through a series of wild, compact, adventurous, and sometimes severe works by Bartók, Janáček, and Ligeti, before turning after the intermission to – what else? – Mozart’s G major Piano Concerto, K453.