Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Marlis Petersen

Director Claus Guth's new production for the Staatsoper Berlin is a bit of a mixed bag but the evening succeeds more on its musical merits, with a splendid ensemble of singers and orchestra conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.

With an unsurpassed cast, devoted conducting and a brilliantly imaginative staging, the Bavarian State Opera's new production of Korngold's Die tote Stadt is a triumph.

Sultry Berg and and a lithe, forceful Beethoven Nine herald an exciting new reign in Berlin.

Marlis Petersen's Alcina bloomed for a knockout “Ah! mio cor!” just in time for intermission.

Beethoven lovers were expecting an authentic recreation of the first version of Fidelio but instead they got Leonore à la Jacobs.

Performers often speak of ecstatic moments. But that ecstasy doesn't always transfer beyond the stage. This was an extraordinary effort to bridge the divide. 

Anno Schreier's successful new opera Hamlet is the first of a series of three Shakespeare-inspired offerings from Theater an der Wien this season. 

In addition to incorporating twelve-tone rows for each character and within larger musical units like canons and chorales, the entirety of the opera itself is palindromic in structure, with performers whose characters died gruesome deaths during the first act returning as new characters in the third.

Richard Eyre’s witty direction may weight Figaro too heavily towards bedroom farce than satirical drama, but with sparky acting it’s difficult not to be won over. 

Come for the singing, enjoy the music and bring your sunglasses: this psychologically charged Idomeneo at the Theater an der Wien is not to be missed.

The human race craves comic relief... a universally accepted fact throughout the entire history of mankind. Comic books, sitcoms, comic theater... all seek to blissfully whisk us out of the doldrums and politics of today’s ever-busy society.

The venerable Viennese tradition of airing dirty operatic laundry in public found an unlikely proponent this season in the form of the Theater an der Wien’s mild-mannered director Roland Geyer, who, unhappy with William Friedkin’s production of The Tales of Hoffmann in March, abruptly sacked the American director and announced he would devise a new staging himself a matter of months before the sec

Read our review of Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leise's production of Ambroise Thomas­'s Hamlet in its 2010 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.