Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Bo Skovhus

At Staatsoper Hamburg, Unsuk Chin’s new opera The Dark Side of the Moon immerses audiences in an hypnotic, introspective journey, where dreams, science and psyche collide in a rigorously crafted, thought-provoking spectacle.

Director Johannes Erath and conductor Alexander Soddy bring György Kurtág's first and only opera to the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, starting the year with a dash of Beckett.

Marlene Monteiro Freitas directs her first opera, in which Lulu, if not buried alive, is certainly left completely unrecognizable. 

When a voice as potent as Christine Goerke’s has to push to be heard, you know there’s a problem.

Director Claus Guth's new production for the Staatsoper Berlin is a bit of a mixed bag but the evening succeeds more on its musical merits, with a splendid ensemble of singers and orchestra conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.

Barbara Hannigan is better than ever in Krzysztof Warlikowski's iconic Lulu at La Monnaie – an historic event.

Keith Warner directs a new opera which packs in betrayal, murder, oppression, freedom, love and the Spanish Inquisition into a mere 90 minutes.

Kent Nagano and the forces of Staatsoper Hamburg launch their new season with a production of Shostakovich's very first opera in which the ears are beguiled but the eyes are not.

The profusion of images and ideas in Frank Castorf's Bavarian Staatsoper production of From the House of the Dead threatens to rob Janáček's opera of its humanity.

Ingo Metzmacher leads a musically formidable performance of Hans Werner Henze’s shipwreck oratorio. Romeo Castellucci’s staging engages the senses but remains emotionally distant.

Baritone Kay Stiefermann steals hearts at the eponymous Count of Luxembourg, in an operetta so charming that neither musical missteps nor a mixed-up staging can sink it.

Vienna staged the first three-act performance of Lulu with Willy Decker adding to his 2000 production, with excellent singing contributing to its success.

Stefan Herheim's eagerly awaited production of Berg's Wozzeck distances us from the emotional heart of the tragedy by portraying the story as a hallucinatory death-room experience.

The Gran Teatre del Liceu's revival of a shortened Merry Widow lacking some of the essence of this highly popular operetta.

A musically classy, rip-roaring staging of Der Graf von Luxemburg - a seasonal treat at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein.

Anno Schreier's successful new opera Hamlet is the first of a series of three Shakespeare-inspired offerings from Theater an der Wien this season. 

Konwitschny's bold approach to Rihm's musical dialectic surprises, challenges, and bewilders. The glorious soundscape created in the Felsenreitschule makes this Eroberung von Mexico a unique, unmissable operatic experience. 

Late in the opera, in the calm that settles after a vaudeville of ballet dancers and Italian singers, Fleming’s poise pervades the Countess’s closing rumination over love and the nature of art. It’s a concert piece nestled in Capriccio’s narrative bustle, and to hear Fleming sing it is to be reminded of her talents as a communicator in music within and beyond the opera stage.

Parsifal at the Deutsche Oper Berlin is both sublime and terrifying. Vincke's Parsifal was bold and heroic while Herlitzius sang with a silver, sinuous soprano. Stolzl's production gave us the fanaticism of religion rather than hope.

It often takes time to adjust to Nikolaus Harnoncourt's tempi, but this concert performance of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro enabled the audience to discover new colours in a well known score. 

The production of Die Fledermaus currently onstage at the Lyric Opera is smart, goofy and not too fussed about keeping all its parts under tight control.

The evening began on a fun note: Juliane Banse’s voice rang out in a pre-recorded message, reminding the audience that as far as she knew, cell phones and classical music did not generally mix. After a community chuckle, the audience applauded Banse, Bo Skovhus and Helmut Deutsch onto the stage, and then settled back into its seats for an evening of Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch.

My mother always told me not to sit too close in the theatre, and after seeing this revival of Martin Kusej’s modern realization of Stravinksy’s The Rake’s Progress at the Theater an der Wien, I think I know what she was talking about.Act I begins innocuously enough in a sparse apartment, unfurnished apart from a mattress and a television.

Vienna is a nostalgic town, and in few places is the past clung onto more tightly than at the State Opera, where a Tosca created for Renata Tebaldi has been pressed creakingly into service for over 55 years now.

On Friday, a new co-production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg opened at the Lyric. The only comedy among Wagner’s mature music dramas, its sound is very much like that of the better-known tragedies – brassy, overfull, with a core of strings teetering at vibrato’s edge.

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.