Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Jeffrey Gwaltney

This year’s Wexford Festival opened with Frederick Delius’ Koanga – a tricky piece to get right, but director Michael Gielata largely succeeded.

Opera Holland Park give us a broad span of human joys and tragedies in an excellently staged and acted rendering of Puccini's Il trittico.

Take an exquisite production of a Puccini tearjerker, cast it attractively… then crush its fragile wings under the weight of the Albert Hall’s vastness.

Stephen Barlow’s staging of Puccini's Western is easy on the eye, if short on verismo. Susannah Glanville impresses as the barkeeper with a heart of gold.

Tonight was the Dublin première of Dvořák’s opera Rusalka, and the most surprising fact about this is that it took 112 years for this enchanting opera to make its debut here. For, as tonight’s performance so aptly illustrated, Rusalka is a glorious work on so many different levels: it has hauntingly beautiful melodies, daring orchestral harmonies and an enchanting but ultimately tragic love story.

In Harry Fehr’s much-anticipated new production of The Flying Dutchman for Scottish Opera, the setting is in Scotland – as Wagner had originally intended before a last-minute switch to Norway during rehearsals for the first production in 1843.

The opera is way too dark. It runs far too long. It’s requires a soprano with vocal cords of amalgamated steel to sing the title role. No wonder Cherubini’s Medea is rarely performed. According to OPERA America records, the opera hasn’t been performed in the United States in nearly 20 years.