Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Angela Denoke

Not a great day for the patriarchy: Ersan Mondtag's gripping new Salome emphasises grotesque caricatures and ends with a bloody, plot-twisting coup d’état. 

A superb cast of singers is let down by Christoph Marthaler's cold, stilted staging as Reimann's Lear returns to its birthplace.  

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s exploration of the Weimar Republic captures the seriousness but none of the fun of the turbulent artistic period.

Mariusz Treliński's double bill pairing returns to the Metropolitan Opera with fine performances from Sonya Yoncheva and Gerald Finley in the leads. 

In Bruckner Six, Salonen simply jumped the red lights and kept driving.

The 1957 production of Parsifal, with its traditional staging and dreamy imageries, was a perfect backdrop to showcase Wagner's celebration of stage play with music on Good Friday.

Vienna staged the first three-act performance of Lulu with Willy Decker adding to his 2000 production, with excellent singing contributing to its success.

Rattle conducts Janáček's glorious score with unerring skill and barely concealed adoration, but is let down by his regular collaborator's muddy vision. 

The Gran Teatre del Liceu's revival of a shortened Merry Widow lacking some of the essence of this highly popular operetta.

Péter Eötvös conceived his opera Senza Sangue (Without Blood) as a complement to Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle. Dmitri Tcherniakov has now staged and designed Senza Sangue together with Bluebeard's Castle for Staatsoper Hamburg.

Bringing out the unabashed colour and detail of the score, Andrew Davis delivered a superb reading in the pit, tightly coherent and with exemplary attentiveness to articulation. 

Konwitschny's bold approach to Rihm's musical dialectic surprises, challenges, and bewilders. The glorious soundscape created in the Felsenreitschule makes this Eroberung von Mexico a unique, unmissable operatic experience. 

Cardillac has a spooky, sinister fascination that both intrigues and horrifies and which is quite successfully expressed in this striking production by Sven-Eric Bechtolf.

The final orchestral performance of this year’s Gergiev festival saw the city of Rotterdam play host to St. Peterburg’s Mariinsky Orchestra.

With this new production of Gluck's Alceste in Madrid, Krzysztof Warlikowski uses a well known popular icon to drag the audience into a two-way process of dramatic exploration.

As my seatmate remarked to me after the concert, it is strange and wonderful to hear Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich, who befriended each other late in life, begin to sound alike in their old age while remaining unmistakably themselves. I agreed.

Those closing bars of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, tottering away into nothingness, is one of the great nexus points in musical history.

In a castle in mediaeval Denmark, King Waldemar and Tove sing rapturously of their love. But dark deeds are afoot: a Wood Dove tells us that Tove has been murdered by Waldemar's jealous queen, Waldemar berates God, he and his men are condemned to rise from their graves every night and ride in a wild hunt - all this to the accompaniment of a giant, brass-laden orchestra playing a lush, opulent symp

This was potentially a very nice programme which frustratingly only rarely lived up to its promise.First on the programme were the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde, the iconic bookends of Wagner's most revolutionary work. The Prelude lacked the extraordinary tension and atmosphere it can have, though the climax was powerful throughout.

Few live events could offer a more intense, visceral, grotesque experience than witnessing a performance of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome translated and adapted for the opera stage by Hermann Lachmann and set to music by Richard Strauss.

Over a hundred years after its première, Richard Strauss's opera Salome retains its ability to shock. The opera was adapted from Oscar Wilde's retelling of the biblical tale, in which Herod's daughter demands and receives the head of the prophet Jokanaan (John the Baptist) on a silver charger.