Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Camilla Tilling

Doing justice to the vast scale of Mahler's "Symphony of a Thousand" is itself the mightiest of tasks. Semyon Bychkov and his NDR forces only partially succeed.

The May Festival pulls all the stops to close their sesquicentennial season with Mahler’s vast and triumphant Eighth Symphony.

Mahler's Second Symphony receives an unforgettably committed and detail-rich performance at the Royal Festival Hall.

Marco Arturo Marelli's 2012 production lacks mystery but puts a fine Golaud centre stage, while Esa-Pekka Salonen ensures superior musical values in the pit. 

Challenging and vivid Bach in the first UK showing of Peter Sellars' staging of Bach's great liturgical masterpiece.

This was a superbly assured performance in which Esa-Pekka Salonen marshalled his forces with a clear-sighted vision to carve out an account brimming with intensity, energy and commitment.

Composers from Purcell to Pierre Boulez have written incidental music. In many cases it proves far from incidental, retaining a place in the concert hall long after the play has faded into oblivion.

The conductor favours measured tempi and unfussy direction, allowing the work to stand mountain-like as an expression of its own intrinsic magnificence.

The Oslo Philharmonic played finely tuned Gabrieli and virtuosic Bach, finishing with a surprisingly sinister performance of Mahler's Fourth Symphony.

In a time when death and mourning lack any public or communal aspect, where the funeral procession has ceased to exist save for royalty and the occasional head of state, what relevance does the traditional dirge have?

Great opera at the Los Angeles Philharmonic as Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande as part of the City of Light, a retrospective that examines works seen in Paris during the first half of the 20th century. 

Le nozze di Figaro is called Figaro’s Bröllop in Swedish, which sounds quite funny to ‘non-Svensks’. With Marcellina behaving like a total trollop, all that is needed to complete the rhyming triplet are the Wallops at Glyndebourne.

With so many performances of Handel’s Messiah popping up around the holidays, how’s one to choose?

Emmanuelle Haïm leads Christiane Karg and Sonia Prina in Handel's sacred oratorio La resurrezione at the Berlin Philharmonic. 

The Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, in collaboration with Peter Sellars, brings their superb dramatic performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion to New York.

Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic give a unique and hugely poignant performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion, staged by Peter Sellars.

Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony Orchestra explore musical perspectives on youthfulness and memory with a programme of Schubert's Fifth and the songs of innocence and experience woven into Mahler's Fourth.

David McVicar's production of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro returns for its sixth revival at the Royal Opera House, the refinement of the production matched, almost at all times, by the performances. 

Can two composers have so much, yet so little in common? Or be such accommodating, yet such uncomfortable bedfellows? The SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg with their principal conductor François-Xavier Roth addressed these questions in exhilarating style, in a “turn-of-the-century time capsule” which thrilled and enchanted upon its opening.

Otto Schenk's production of Der Rosenkavalier is now four decades old but it still looks quite fresh, its opulence unfaded.

Christmas may have inspired much of the greatest holiday-related popular music, but in the Classical tradition, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (to say nothing of his St. John Passion and Easter Oratorio) points toward the influence of Easter.

If there were to be one orchestra that is essentially a “dream team”, the World Orchestra for Peace would surely be it.