Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Matthew Stiff

A standout performance by Alison Langer as Gilda lights up an Opera Holland Park season opener marred by illness. 

The director Edward Dick and his designer, Tom Scutt, alternate between realistic and expressionistic images in their creation of grim spectacle.

Julia Burbach's new production lacks poetry in spite of an admirable cast led by Samuel Dale Johnson in the title role. 

Bizet's Carmen at Leeds Grand Theatre, directed by Edward Dick and conducted by Garry Walker, provides thought-provoking modern resonances as well as an uplifting, tune-filled experience.

English Touring Opera open their autumn season with the first of two Singspiels. 

Grange Park Opera’s enjoyable new production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera looks a little homespun on stage, but has plenty of musical compensations.

Blanche McIntyre's new production for ETO proves a disappointment, saddled with a trip hazard of a set. 

Wonderful singing and playing liven up a slightly lifeless staging of Mozart's turbulent masterpiece. 

This small, fun, fast-paced comedy, probably the UK première of Salieri's neglected fairytale, makes for a glorious garden opera evening at Bampton (and touring). 

James Conway’s production of La bohème may be a little restrained on banter, but hits all the emotional high notes, is compellingly played and superbly sung. 

Written half a century before the verismo movement, Donizetti paints a true-to-life portrait of a besieged people which is genuinely touching. James Conway's straightforward production features some notable individual singers and an excellent performance by the chorus.

Stylish, intelligent and visceral, with a magnetic central performance by Claire Rutter, Grange Park give us a powerful, tough La traviata updated to 1950s Hollywood.

Bringing Peter Grimes to Grange Park a year after the Britten centenary is an enormous challenge. With ‘Grimes on the Beach’ still fresh in the memory, the task of recreating the Suffolk coast in Hampshire’s idyllic countryside might have seemed a step too far. 

When you think chic, black-tie country house opera, you probably don’t also think sixteen barefoot nuns being executed. Grange Park Opera’s fusion of these two contrasting ideas, however, has a lot going for it: their production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites combines its minimal but effective staging with some impressive singing.

With programming in the major opera houses dominated by Verdi and Wagner, bel canto fans have had a slightly thin time of it this year (Covent Garden’s La donna del lago is an exception). But others are filling some of the gaps, with Rossini’s Maometto II coming up at Garsington and Stephen Langridge’s production of Bellini’s I Puritani, which opened at Grange Park last night.

Eugene Onegin, a lyric opera by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, is based on Pushkin’s novel of the same name, converted into an operatic libretto by Konstantin Shilovsky. It tells the tale of a selfish hero, Onegin, who rejects the outburst of love from the young Tatyana and instead flirts with her older sister, Olga, who is engaged to his best friend, Lensky. This leads to a duel, in which Lensky is killed.

Celebrating its 25th anniversary season, British Youth Opera are once again exploring the 19th- and 20th-century lyric repertoire in staging their first ever production of Smetana’s comic opera The Bartered Bride alongside Judith Weir’s A Night at the Chinese Opera.

Donizetti’s one act opera, Rita, composed in 1841 formed the first half of last night’s double bill at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. The second half comprised another late work, Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, composed in 1891 to a libretto by Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modest. Rita turns out to be far more entertaining than the plot outline promises and deserves to be more widely seen.