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The compelling story of boxer Emile Griffith's struggles with guilt and sexuality are not ideally rendered in James Robinson's new production.

The young soprano Lise Davidsen scored a successful debut at the Met, with impressive support by conductor Vasily Petrenko, also making a debut, led a memorable revival of Pique Dame. 

Salonen brings his Stravinsky retrospective to a close with a pair of Greek-inspired scores. 

A conventional and quite predictable staging of Lehár’s most famous operetta was saved by dedicated musicians.

John Relyea owns the stage as Méphistophélès in Boston Symphony’s Faust. 

 Michelle DeYoung and Paul Groves were the soloists in Mahler’s late “symphony with solo voices.” The concert opened with a classically balanced reading of Schubert’s “Unfinished” symphony.

After being absent since December, music director Riccardo Muti returned to Chicago Symphony in a passionate account of the epic Roméo et Juliette by Berlioz.

Charles Dutoit stands as arguably today’s premier Berlioz conductor. If his case needed any special pleading, it was pled well in Symphony Hall when he bracketed the Resurrexit and Te Deum with Henri Dutillieux’s Timbre, espace, mouvement ou La Nuit étoilée.

In addition to incorporating twelve-tone rows for each character and within larger musical units like canons and chorales, the entirety of the opera itself is palindromic in structure, with performers whose characters died gruesome deaths during the first act returning as new characters in the third.

Odyssey Opera's concert performance of Le Cid is sadly compromised by the size of the hall. 

A double bill of Tchaikovsky's Iolanta and Stravinsky's Perséphone fares strongly in Aix-en-Provence. 

Paul Groves, Sir Willard White and Ruxandra Donose are the top-flight principals, with excellent support from the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus.

Director Johannes Erath sets Wagner's Lohengrin balancing on a knife edge between fantasy and reality in a beautiful, thought-provoking and magnificently sung production.

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.

What is perhaps even more remarkable than the unabashed grandeur of the new Parsifal at the Lyric Opera of Chicago is the degree to which its spectacle draws on the images and genres of 20th-century media technologies including popular music.

In one of several (pretty outrageous) notes to conductors in the score of his Roméo et Juliette, Berlioz states that “the average listener has no imagination” and, as a result of this, the sixth movement of the work should be cut in 99 per cent of performances.

It’s so good to hear Tippett’s ravishing opera, The Midsummer Marriage, performed in full at the Proms, particularly in Britten’s centenary year. Tippet’s work is like an antidote to Britten’s drier, more literal operatic style – so overflowing with warmth, colour and hope.

Institutional violence has been a running theme in Torsten Fischer’s series of Gluck operas at the Theater an der Wien, albeit with a lid kept firmly on the idea of actual conflict.

If you’ve never been to a grand-scale choral work at the Royal Albert Hall, I’d urge you to do so at the earliest opportunity. This wasn’t my first visit to the Proms, and I’ve experienced oratorios, requiems and passions galore in other places, but to hear hundreds of accomplished singers filling this vast circular space was new territory for me. The hall seemed made for the occasion.

The numerous links and connections between each of tonight’s pieces make this a very cleverly crafted programme, on paper at least.

Elgar’s oratorios The Apostles (1903) and The Kingdom (1906) are the manifestation of a fascination that he had held since his childhood in Worcester.

The last of this season’s Proms Choral Sundays featured one of the most complex of all choral works, Beethoven’s massive Missa Solemnis, written around the time of his 9th symphony. Sir Colin Davis likened performing it to “Failing to reach the top of Mount Everest”, and Sara Mohr-Pietsch (in her excellent Proms Plus talk) mentioned the description of “the most famous work you have never heard”.

Read our review of Stephen Wadsworth’s production of Iphigénie en Tauride by Gluck, in its 2011 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.

Read our review of Zhang Yimou's production of Tan Dun's The First Emperor in its 2007 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.