Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Bertrand de Billy

The Norwegian soprano scores a major success at Covent Garden in her role debut as Elisabetta, whetting appetites for more Verdi to come. 

John Dexter's production, now among the longest-serving in the company's repertory, remains a marvel of simple, effective storytelling.

Adam Palka shines as the devil in this revival of Frank Castorf's multimedia staging that relocates the work to mid-20th century Paris, around the end of the Algerian War.

Faust and Méphistophélès pal around like buddies in Castorf's multi-media staging, the devil here less diabolical and more anarchistic party-boy. 

The Russian diva makes her Vienna role debut in Margarethe Wallmann's classic 1958 production. 

A five-hour operatic marathon as the full, five-act French version of Verdi's epic Don Carlos returns to the Staatsoper after a seven-year hiatus. 

Bertrand de Billy made his debut with the LPO in an all-French programme headlined by Fauré's Requiem and preceded by a rewarding pairing of Poulenc's Organ Concerto and Sept Repons des Tenebres

All three operas in Puccini's triptych are strongly cast in this revival. 

And the new, Spring casting for David McVicar's new production of Tosca has an ace in the hole – Anna Netrebko – and she certainly did not disappoint. 

Laurent Pelly’s staging provided some of the most memorable moments in this performance of Cendrillon. 

The role of Luisa, some of the daintier coloratura aside, fits Sonya Yoncheva like a glove. 

This was meant to be Pretty Yende's night, but it was Armenian tenor Liparit Avetisyan who stole hearts as country bumpkin Nemorino. 

Has Health and Safety finally caught up with the Spanish Inquisition? A flameless auto-da-fé and some low-key individual performances meant this revival took time to hit its stride. 

A compelling staging of Gluck's 1779 opera in Paris. 

For anyone seeing Carmen for the first time, this Royal Opera revival will have been a more than satisfactory evening. Old hands hoping to see something extra will find it in Hymel's Don José and Car's Micaëla, but not elsewhere.

Amid red carpets and canapés, the Lyric Opera’s 2013/14 season opened on Saturday night with a work that perfectly suited the storm gathering above as ball-gowned luminaries swept into the hall: Verdi’s Otello, that late masterpiece of mood and terraced intensities.

Goethe’s epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (“The Sorrows of Young Werther”) hit the 1774 zeitgeist not only because it brought back emotion to the rather sober Age of Enlightenment, but because the tragic title hero sports a multi-faceted character that lends itself to various interpretations and projections, therefore making it easy to feel sympathy or even partly identify with the

I once heard a lecture by Gérard Mortier, then head of the Paris Opera, contrasting the twin operatic traditions starting from Monteverdi's serious and affecting dramma per musica and the lavish court entertainments of Lully. A couple of centuries on, there's no need to ask the side of the fence on which Massenet's Cendrillon falls.

Never a city to shy away from seasonal programming, this Easter Vienna is offering productions of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, Gounod’s Faust, and Wagner’s Parsifal. The latter two, at the Staatsoper, are familiar, but audiences should run to see the Theater an der Wien’s enthralling revival of Poulenc’s relatively rarely-produced masterwork.