Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Yuri Vorobiev

Gergiev and the Mariinsky excel in Act III of Tristan und Isolde with the help of star singing from Vekua, Westbroek and Nikitin; George Li shows promise in Liszt.

Valery Gergiev conducts the Mariinsky Opera in a vocally strong Das Rheingold, a promising beginning to Edinburgh International Festival’s Ring in concert over the coming years.

Volkov conducts BBC SSO in a Russian retelling, with acclaimed bass, Yuri Vorobiev. 

A rare chance to see Berlioz's five act epic Les Troyens. Huge Russian forces from the Mariinsky Opera under Valery Gergiev visit the Edinburgh Festival. 

Valery Gergiev and the LSO present a concert of two halves: an awkward Brahms Piano Concerto, but a thrilling Janáček Glagolitic Mass.

In program notes, Christoph Eschenbach, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, calls Parsifal “the culmination of Wagner’s work”. For his orchestra’s recent celebration of Wagner’s bicentennial at the Kennedy Center, Eschenbach programmed a concert performance of Act III of the composer’s final opera: the culmination of the culmination, one could say.

We celebrate this year the bicentennials of two of the most influential composers of the 19th century. Yet celebrations in Amsterdam have been rather one-sided so far.

Why attend a concert performance of an opera? What is the point without the action and the spectacle collectively resulting in, hopefully, the awe-inspiring whole? In answer to this I should like to suggest that concert performances of opera are the perfect opportunity to really ‘get under the skin’ of a work, for two principal reasons.