Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Aaron Sheehan

Once again, the BEMF brings a Baroque opera back to life. Reinhard Keiser’s 1705 Octavia is exceptionally well sung, adroitly staged, designed and danced, with impeccable musicianship.

Opera Atelier's return to the earliest part of the repertoire with Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria showcases their strengths in a relatively restrained production anchored by a strong ensemble cast.

“Leave your hoop skirts and swords at home,” the audience was advised, in order to avoid overcrowding when Handel’s Messiah premiered in Dublin in 1742.

Handel's La Resurrezione, anchored the Boston Early Music Festival’s Thursday programs in a dramatic reading by many of the same forces performing Campra’s La Carnaval de Venise.

With Lully’s death in 1687 and Louis XIV’s increasing immersion in religious piety under the influence of Madame de Maintenon, the court ceased to exercise a strangle hold on opera.

Cal Performances and Philharmonia Baroque present a lavish modern-day première of the 1745 version of Rameau's Le Temple de la Gloire. 

In spite of superb performances from the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra and the two lead soloists, Steffani’s Niobe at the Concertgebouw offers too few inspired moments to make it truly memorable.

A deeply stirring interpretation of Bach's St John Passion from Pacific Musicworks in Seattle. 

For almost two decades, Opera Lafayette has been known to DC opera fans as a period-based ensemble reviving long-forgotten gems of French Baroque and Rococo chamber opera repertoire. On Thursday night, the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater hosted Opera Lafayette’s most recent creation: its production of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s pastorale/tragédie en musique Actéon.

To accompany the exhibition “The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini,” the early music ensemble TENET held court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a lovely concert of musical portraits from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

In der Lachmuskeln strapazierenden Inszenierung formationseigenen Gilbert Blins gelingt dem BEMF ein Opernspaß, der es absolut verdient, vermehrt sein fantastisches Unwesen treiben zu dürfen.

Les Violons du Roy ont donné un éclatant Messie au Palais Montcalm, offrant une interprétation originale et vivifiante du tube haendelien.

Le Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra et pas moins de neufs chanteurs issus de différents horizons étaient réunis pour l’exécution du septième opéra en trois actes du compositeur italien Agostino Steffani, Niobe, Regina di Tebe.