Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Marc Minkowski

A grand rendition of Verdi’s Don Carlos opens season at the Grand Théâtre de Genève under the inspired baton of Marc Minkowski, in his first encounter with the opera, directed by Lydia Steier. 

The Staatsoper Unter den Linden's multi-seasonal Baroque project continues with a new production of Mozart's first opera seria, which roars and soars under the conducting of Marc Minkowski.

Laurent Pelly’s new production combines froth and hilarity with a dark, satirical heart; Marc Minkowski and the orchestra seduce us.

Stepping in for Sir Simon Rattle, Marc Minkowski's balanced, lyrical approach to Schumann's oratorio proves successful.

The soloists turn out to be the perfect couple, while the camerawork covers the action like it was a soccer match.

A rare outing for Beethoven's ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus, paired with a fiery symphony by Haydn. 

A terrific cast takes on the latest revival of Kasper Holten’s video-infused staging of Mozart’s opera buffa.

More than 200 years after Mozart premiered La clemenza di Tito at the Estates Theatre, Marc Minkowski reveals there are still surprises to be found.

An oriental sweetmeat from the pen of Henri Rabaud, based on a tale from The Arabian Nights, is revived triumphantly in Paris. 

An early Christmas celebration in Budapest, with four of Bach's cantatas from his Christmas Oratorio.

The third opera of the Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy opens the opera festival in Drottningholm, the "Swedish Versailles", with a good cast beautifully conducted by Marc Minkowski.

Dangling and turning like shards of a giant overhead chandelier in Don Giovanni’s banquet hall, this is an evocative multimedia production that tantalizes the senses while shining new light on Mozart's genius. 

Baroque purists might prefer a more surefire line-up of brilliantly executed arias, but the theatrical framework of Adrian Noble's Alcina production offers a great deal.

Excellent playing from Les Musiciens du Louvre and a mixed vocal performance are matched by a staging by Ivan Alexandre likely to be controversial.

A lush programme of Fauré, Stravinsky, and Poulenc is let down by Minkowski's erratic conducting, but is partially redeemed by two of France's fastest rising singers.

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.

An all-Mozart Filarmonica della Scala concert with soloists Vilde Frang and Hanna-Elisabeth Müller under conductor Marc Minkowski's lacked cohesion.

Any revival of La traviata stands or falls by its principals and their ability to inhabit the roles rather than merely sing them prettily. A good revival director helps. 

“Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It’s a bum’s life,” stated the late, great Marlon Brando. Felix Breisach took this idea to heart when staging his modernized Figaro in a mental institution.

“Here be dragons!” warned seafaring maps of yore, denoting uncharted territories. Martin Kušej, undertaking his first Royal Opera exploration, excised the sea monster from his vision of Mozart’s Idomeneo. 

Gounod's Faust returns after 45 years to the National Dutch Opera, and this new production directed by Catalan theatre company La Fura dels Baus, lead by a fine cast and conducted by Marc Minkowski is nothing short of spectacular.

What a pleasure it was to see the effervescent Marc Minkowski conducting a programme of 20th-century French music with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It was certainly a lively and well-thought-out concert, with Minkowski bringing all the clarity and detailed awareness of colour that he has bought to his performances of early music.

Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt is one of those works that never gets performed with all the context in which it was composed. The two suites Grieg compiled are often played and well-loved, but Peer Gynt was in fact written as the music for the dramatization of Ibsen’s poem of the same title.

Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet has riled and infuriated ever since its 1868 première, though for many it is merely an object of derision: one 1869 correspondent to the satirical magazine Punch admits not having seen the work but nevertheless disparages it as ‘Omelette’, a musical ‘burlesque’, and pillories Thomas’s fondness for drinking songs with the lines ‘To drink or not to drink? That is now the que