Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Sir John Eliot Gardiner

Refined if sometimes raucous pleasures from Haydn and Mozart as the EBS continues its European tour. 

Gardiner's vivacious conducting of the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia made this performance one to remember.

Under the direction of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Zurich’s fine Tonhalle Orchestra, The Monteverdi Choir and soloists launch a sonorous holiday season with Hector Berlioz’s sacred oratorio L’Enfance du Christ.

Alice Coote is totally mesmerising in Britten's cantata Phaedra in a concert stream from London's Southbank.  

Ligeti's Concert Românesc gets a well characterised reading, but Gardiner's Bartók and Haydn come off less well at LSO St Luke's.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Stephen Hough and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra provide oodles of vibrancy and passion in Schumann and Brahms.

Both live and online, a gifted conductor and world-class orchestra offer an inspirational overview of Czech music.

Soloists and choir, headed by a spellbinding Christian Gerhaher, brought real lustre to Schumann’s treatment of Goethe’s magnum opus.

Truls Mørk was cultured and intense in Dvořák’s Cello Concerto while Sir John Eliot Gardiner took the LSO through its paces in Suk’s emotional beast of a symphony.

To mark the 150th anniversary of the composer's death, Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts the opera charting the escapades of the Italian goldsmith and sculptor. 

An exquisitely matched pair of sopranos as Susanna and the Countess make up for some quirky casting elsewhere. 

Rising like a phoenix, the Alexandra Palace Theatre stages its first opera since its reopening after eighty years of slumber. 

Concluding Gardiner's Schumann cycle, it was a memorable concert, with a memorable Spring Symphony and a musical Manfred Overture. The Beethoven first piano concerto proved an unlikely hero.

A memorable evening: LSO horns on tremendous form with Sir John Eliot Gardiner on the podium and Isabelle Faust in stellar performance.

This concert was inevitably the sum of far more than its parts, and not for nothing are the Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantiquem, regarded as among the best in the world

Antoine Tamestit takes a peripatetic approach to Byron's brooding hero, while Joyce DiDonato dies – twice – as Cleopatra and Dido. 

A taste of the opening weekend in Leipzig’s marathon Bach Festival. 

Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his Baroque specialists continue their crusade to bring Bach's church cantatas to the modern world.

The replication of the weekend’s triumph was cut short by a somewhat dimly executed Fourth Symphony, as violinist Faust stole the show. 

With Gardiner’s eye for detail, the LSO triumph in a concert that marks the start of a new Schumann symphony cycle.

An unapologetic treat at the Proms and a composition of immediate appeal.

The final opera in Sir John Eliot Gardiner's Monteverdi 450 trilogy features an excellent cast and inspires deep emotion.

Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, the second opera of the Monteverdi 450 trilogy being toured by Sir John Eliot Gardiner, had a strong performance in Salzburg.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner's Monteverdi 450 trilogy began its Salzburg run with a tear-jerking concert performance of L'Orfeo.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner rendered Elgar’s Second Symphony with broad, excessive, strokes, while Ann Hallenberg brought hushed intensity to Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts an evening where much pomp and circumstance does little justice to the multifarious aesthetics of a great composer.

Prom 20 proved an exhilarating journey, featuring Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette as one of the key works of this year’s BBC Proms' Shakespeare 400 celebrations.

John Eliot Gardiner assembled the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists for a moving performance of JS Bach's great oratorio.

The superb Monteverdi Chorus and the English Baroque Soloists recently brought a kind a seraphic force to Bach's St Matthew Passion.

Shakespeare's Nick Bottom, who claimed “a reasonable good ear in music” would surely have approved of these performances at the Barbican Hall. 

Initially, it felt a little strange to be celebrating Mozart’s 260th Birthday with a performance of his sombre Requiem, but this turned out to be no ordinary performance of the popular work. 

Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts the English Baroque Soloists through three Mozart Symphonies in one evening, educating along the way.

Juan Diego Flórez turns in a tour de force in the title role of a consistently attractive and inventive performance of Gluck's ballet-laden Orphée et Eurydice.

A Franco-German alliance of trailblazing symphonies from the early 19th century performed with style by Sir John Eliot Gardiner's own Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique band of musicians.

A joyously fresh and zesty Orfeo, played on a selection of period instruments and with a magnificent leading tenor, makes for a superb evening of Monteverdi with Sir John Eliot Gardiner. 

The Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists performed Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in Costa Mesa.

A sensational finale to Beethoven's Fifth concludes the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique's 25th birthday concert, following a fine display of vocal excellence by Anna Caterina Antonacci.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir in a late night performance of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis at the BBC Proms.

If Count Almaviva (to say nothing of Don Giovanni) were alive today, he might perhaps enlist Richard Dawkins to defend his behaviour. We know from evolutionary biology that the male stands the best chance of passing on his genes if he has many partners, the female if she can keep the male around to help raise the children he’s had with her.

Friday’s two Proms had a theme running through them: Resurrection, Easter and Ascension. I wasn’t quite sure how I would feel about listening to Bach’s small-scale oratorios after Mahler’s mighty “Resurrection” Symphony, but I needn’t have worried. Compared to Mahler’s angst and doubt in the symphony, Bach’s unwavering Christian faith was reassuring.

There’s something quite strongly “neoclassical” about the whole historically-informed performance movement. Someone like Sir John Eliot Gardiner, who has championed the use of detailed historical knowledge of performance practice and instruments, has never actually been attempting to transport us all back to the 18th century. That would be futile, obviously.

Writing a positive review is not an easy task. When confronted with something lacking error, a review can go one of two ways: a brief and simple praise of all involved and a summary of the evening, or an over-the-top full-blown confession of awe and admiration. Spoiler alert: this review is the latter.

Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is an odd piece. Despite having a rich recorded legacy, it is not a piece that one encounters often in the concert hall. The technical challenges of this music are up there with virtually any other piece of combined music for choir and orchestra.

As I walked to this concert by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir, I wondered what might have changed in Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Beethoven in the two decades since he first recorded these symphonies.

Opera at the 2012 Proms began with a performance of Debussy’s only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande. Conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the production celebrated the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, and marked the 24 years since Gardiner first brought the work to the Royal Albert Hall with the Opéra de Lyon.

Verdi's Rigoletto is a work of contrasts. The Duke is equally at home in a glittering palace or a tawdry brothel (a historically accurate characterisation of King Francis I of France, on whom his character is based); his romantic ballads are juxtaposed with the musical depiction of violent storms. Pretty courtly dances share the stage with powerful orchestral evocations of impending doom.

Bach, Biber, St. John's Smith Square. Clever juxtapositions, and they worked. The programmer of this concert - by the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Solists under Sir John Eliot Gardiner - had a neat thought, to place Bach's six Motets (BWV 225-230) into the former church in SW1. The building and the motets date from the same decade, the 1720's.

The overture to Der Freischütz is a familiar concert warm-up, but the opera itself is a rarer find these days. It wasn't always so. With over fifty performances in the eighteen months following its 1821 Berlin debut, Weber's spooky tale of souls traded for magic bullets was an instant hit.

Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, Durham Cathedral and Sir John Eliot Gardiner – a glorious combination of music and architecture, in the hands of a man who made his name bringing the Vespers out of obscurity and into their well-deserved place in the concert repertoire.

The internet makes it simple for the mind's ear to travel. A click to this page on Bachtrack and you're right there: in the Dvorak Hall of the Rudolfinum in Prague, listening to the Czech Philharmonic. Hearing that orchestra play away from home, in the Royal Albert Hall, one loses something - a lot of the instrumental detail inevitably drifts off into the hall.