Performer: Alexander James Edwards

Michael Sanderling conducts the Dresden Philharmonic in Beethoven in Cardiff.

Blanche McIntyre's new production for ETO proves a disappointment, saddled with a trip hazard of a set. 

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.

Rapturously romantic, intimate, moving, unforgettable: more English summer opera should be like Iford. And the garden is like Narnia in the spring. 

Once upon a time it was standard practice that most public concerts in Britain would be preceded by the National Anthem; last night in Huddersfield Town Hall a great many members of the audience were caught off guard when a brass and percussion fanfare struck up into the loudest, most ecstatic rendition of ‘God Save the Queen’ I have ever heard.