Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Andrew McTaggart

Opera Bohemia provides a fun-filled showcase for Conservatoire graduates in a finely sung Falstaff heading for the Edinburgh Fringe with a small orchestra.

Sixty young singers and players thrill and chill in the world première of Karen McIver’s Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. 

Justina Gringyte is a fabulous Carmen in Scottish Opera's dark take on this most tuneful of operas. Large choruses, including children with cigarettes, and a strong supporting cast make this an enjoyable show.

Opera Bohemia bring the boisterous tale of Gianni Schicchi to the Edinburgh Fringe in a fun-filled hour of musical delight.

Scottish Opera revives Sir David McVicar's Madama Butterfly. It still looks wonderful. The music, players and singers tell the harrowing story magnificently.

Big opera productions capture the limelight, but there is no denying the impact of Scottish Opera arriving in tiny communities with this entertaining show of staged operatic excerpts.

Scottish Opera's Don Pasquale is a well sung and fun-filled delight to lift the winter spirits.

Scottish Opera made a wise choice in selecting Handel’s concise court drama to tour widely across Scotland this autumn. This is the ideal showcase for its Emerging Artist singers and also the new faces in the production team.

To end the 2012/13 season, Scottish Opera has teamed up with the D’Oyly Carte Company to create a crisp new production of The Pirates of Penzance, which heads off to England and Wales after touring Scotland.

Audiences have come to look forward to the annual co-production between Scottish Opera and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where student opera singers, orchestra players and backstage crew get a chance to partner up with their professionals across the other side of Glasgow’s Hope Street.

In Scotland, the world of tapestry has been emerging in an exciting revival, bringing this too often overlooked art form into focus. In 2010 the 104-metre Prestonpans tapestry of embroidered panels was unveiled, celebrating the journey 25-year-old Bonnie Prince Charlie made from France, then through the Scottish Highlands to victory at the Scottish town of Prestonpans.

While on a wildlife safari holiday in the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana, Alexander McCall Smith asked his guides to take him across a river to where two primatologists were researching baboon behaviour. Baboons are matriarchal and uniquely in common with humans, high status is inherited.