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Lindy Hume directs a refreshingly uncomplicated new staging for New Zealand Opera, supported by fine musical performances.

Krisztian Lada's thoughtful production goes to the dark heart of ETA Hoffmann's stories, mixing Offenbach's deceptively cheerful music with staging that is always impactful and sometimes gross.

Peter Mumford's intelligent staging concept and a knockout performance by a reduced Philharmonia Orchestra made this a night to remember.

Some rousing singing from the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir of the famous choruses from the great operas. 

Vienna's Theater an der Wien stage a seldom performed opera by Carl Maria von Weber with an excellent cast, orchestra, and chorus.  

Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande emerges from an almost transcendent realm and creates a languorous atmosphere, even if it leaves some questions unanswered and realities unexplored. 

Celebrating its 60th anniversary, the Chicago Symphony Chorus made this evening truly distinctive.

The Cleveland Orchestra’s centennial season was off to an auspicious start with an encore presentation of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen.

This summer’s production of Bizet’s Carmen on the Seebühne stage in Bregenz offers a great spectacle. 

A high-minded approach to Bach's masterpiece is undercut by an uneven performance.

Beethoven’s call to joy and brotherhood left much to be desired if not for a fantastic chorus in the final movement. 

Crowning this cycle came a truly magnificent performance of Götterdämmerung, centred very much on Richard Farnes and his orchestra.

Opera North's cycle offers a form of personal Wagner therapy: all four music dramas in concert performances, but with carefully choreographed video and lighting effects. 

Mahler's epic setting of the final scene from Goethe's Faust is so demanding of musical resources that any performance is a special occasion: what better work to conclude the Orchestra Of Opera North's triumphant 2015-2016 season? 

Though certainly not the most heartwarming of tales this Christmas season, this is a production one shouldn’t miss.

Superlative vocal and instrumental soloists, led by Michael Schade as a vividly intense Evangelist, impress in Bach’s St John Passion at the Concertgebouw.

A colour-coded Mosè in Egitto uses the paintings of Marc Chagall to inspire the costumes for the Jews and the Egyptians in this production of a Rossinian rarity.

After Cavalli’s Ercole Amante in 2009 and Handel’s Deidamia in 2011, De Nederlandse Opera is continuing its exploration of obscure Baroque operas with Gluck’s Armide, until 27 October.I always wondered why Armide was Gluck’s own favourite work.

Saturday night’s performance of Handel’s oratorio Theodora at La Maison Symphonique in Montréal was magnificent, probably the best concert I’ve seen this season. Les Violons du Roy, La Chapelle de Québec, as well as a handful of soloists from Québec and England, all under the masterful direction of Bernard Labadie, brought this somewhat obscure work vividly to life.

On Wednesday night the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts was more crowded than a shopping mall during the holiday season. Apparently, nothing could keep DC opera lovers from getting to the Washington National Opera - not even the notorious peak hour traffic.It comes as no surprise that Mozart’s Don Giovanni, known to some as "the greatest opera ever written" is on most opera fans’ must-see lists.

When I heard that Washington National Opera’s upcoming production of Jules Massenet’s romantic and beautifully tragic opera Werther would be set in the 20th century, I was intrigued.

A piece of music written by a dying composer, left unfinished and completed by a dedicated friend from the chaotic fragments left behind. This is not just the story of Mozart’s Requiem, so familiar to many from Peter Schaeffer’s colourful retelling in Amadeus, but also of Bartók’s Viola concerto, which was imaginatively paired with the more well-known Requiem by Northern Sinfonia this evening.

The concept of freedom is at the heart of Opera North's current production of Fidelio. As soon as you open your programme, you are encouraged by the company's General Director Richard Mantle to consider Beethoven's only opera as having something to say about the struggle for liberty that has been taking place in the Middle East over the past few months.