Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Alan Ewing

Ich kam wie sonst auch beim Royal Opera House an, machte es mir auf meinem Sitz bequem und – können Sie es glauben – die Oper war weg!

Barry goes for out-weirding Carroll at a fast and furious pace. There's plenty of fun and it's beautifully staged – but is that enough?

After nearly two decades away from the Covent Garden stage, it was time Britten's Billy Budd came home, in a new production from Madrid by Deborah Warner. 

Fine singing all round, sensitive continuo musicianship and dramatic action make for a thoroughly enjoyable Return of Ulysses by Monteverdi.

Trophy room glass display cases and glassy-eyed stuffed animals are the setting for a distinctive take on Wagner's epic music drama. 

Gerald Barry’s deliciously anarchic operatic setting of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest returns to the London stage.

Stephen Medcalf's meticulous staging of Tchaikovsky's bitter masterpiece is lit up by Jung Soo Yun's Lensky, giving a direct injection of emotions: verismo before its time.

Interviewed at the Barbican Centre last year, Stephen Fry described Gerald Barry’s score for The Importance of Being Earnest (2010) rather unfavourably as “taking a machete to a soufflé”. However, this zany opera based on Oscar Wilde’s classic play of 1895 has already emerged victorious from concert premières in Los Angeles and London.

Handel’s Jephtha is an oratorio, rather than an opera. However, the story is one of high drama and emotion, and thus the work lends itself easily to operatic adaptation.

There’s usually plenty of hype surrounding a newly written opera performed at Covent Garden, but the carefully placed stories about Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune are on the improbable end of the scale, featuring a flying kebab shop and a team of breakdancers. So I arrived at Miss Fortune without any real idea of what I was going to get.