Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Christine Schäfer

What do you get for the composer who made – and also kind of broke – everything? Arnold Schoenberg’s well-documented phobia of the number 13 aside, he could not have asked for a superior tribute in his 150th anniversary year.

It often takes time to adjust to Nikolaus Harnoncourt's tempi, but this concert performance of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro enabled the audience to discover new colours in a well known score. 

A new production of Ariadne auf Naxos is a major draw in itself, but a queue for standing room whose end is on the other side of the opera house is news even in Vienna, especially when the performance is not the première, but the fourth in a run of five and also the one that Franz Welser-Möst left to Jeffrey Tate, who has conducted the piece to positive reviews before.

The seventh of the chamber music Proms this year brought together two of the greatest composers of the early 20th century. Though Debussy was twelve years Schoenberg’s senior, of the two works performed it is Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire which was written first, in 1912, with Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola and harp following three years later in 1915.

At first sight the choice of programme and musicians for this pre-Beethoven Festival concert was a bit odd. Music by Verdi, Richard Strauss and Dvořák played by La Scala's Filarmonica, under the direction of Oxford-born Daniel Harding.The title of the evening – "La Scala on the Rhine" – gave a hint. The Milanese orchestra was on a short tour – to Bonn on Saturday and Dresden on Sunday.

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

Read our review of Nathaniel Merrill's production of Der Rosenkavalier by Strauss, in its 2010 HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Read our review of  Richard Jones' production of Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel in its 2008 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.