Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Julia Sporsén

A study of landscapes, freedom and love from the Anna-Maria Helsing and BBC Concert Orchestra, plus the world premiere of a Trinidadian concerto for orchestra. 

Jennifer France stars in Stephen Barlow's staging of The Cunning Little Vixen, set in the perfect surroundings of Holland Park. 

A spirited and seamless production of Strauss’s Ariadne is aided by some excellent singing and playing at London’s premier summer opera festival.

Antony McDonald’s take on Ariadne auf Naxos, a co-production from Scottish Opera and Opera Holland Park, sparkles with wit. 

Problems of orchestral balance cloud Olivia Fuchs's straightforward, compelling staging of Janáček’s tirade against the rigidity and hypocrisy of small town society.

Julian Anderson’s Thebans, a bold attempt at condensing Sophocles’ three Theban plays into a single opera. The result is a powerful piece of theatre which drags the audience into the story of Oedipus’s horrific downfall and death, with its ensuing civil war.

This autumn is Strauss and Freud season in London: while the Royal Opera are showing Charles Edwards’s searingly Freudian take on Richard Strauss’s Elektra, ENO have opted for the polar opposite mood with Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus: Christopher Alden’s production is just as Viennese, just as laden with dreams and sexuality, but filled to the brim with gags and frivolous decadence.

As I left Holland Park after last night’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, I found myself wondering what they’d put in the orchestra’s cups of tea at the interval. Or, perhaps, what was it that conductor Stuart Stratford said to them.

The second collaboration between Opera Rara and the BBC Symphony Orchestra brought a starry cast to the Barbican Centre on Sunday evening for a revival of Donizetti’s tragic opera Belisario. Written in 1836, immediately after the triumph of Lucia di Lammermoor, it was an instant success following its première at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice and remained in the repertoire for several decades.

For a Parisian, the accordion is the musical instrument most redolent of memories and dreams. So for Bohuslav Martinů's surrealist opera Julietta, written in Paris and infused with a discombobulating jumble of memories and dreams, Antony McDonald's sets were masterpieces: in each of three acts, the stage is dominated by a giant accordion which is more or less the size of the whole stage.

Where could be more appropriate to see the story of Caligula, Rome’s most notorious emperor/self-proclaimed God, than in the Coliseum! Its purple SPQR livery made the opening to this performance all the more striking as Caligula, dishevelled, unhinged and not a little scary, crept on stage through the curtain in dead silence.

The glittering white of a luxury cruise liner above, the darkened hell of the concentration camp below. Johan Engels' set for Weinberg's The Passenger, first seen at the Bregenz festival in 2010 and now at the ENO in London, is one of the most striking and effective opera sets I've ever seen, both framing the action and adding colour.