Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Catherine Foster

Tobias Kratzer gives his third Strauss production in three seasons at Deutsche Oper Berlin another contemporary spin. 

A Ring cycle of sustained excellence closes with telling contributions from Foster, Vinke and Pesendorfer in the three lead roles.

Six excellent singers bring out the best in Wagner's dramatic narrative, marred only by a Ride of the Valkyries that fails to convince.

Emily Magee was in glowingly refulgent voice as the 'damsel in distress', Euryanthe, in this concert performance of Weber's rarity. 

A classic production of Strauss' searing operatic depiction of the House of Atreus is revived with a particularly accomplished cast and musical direction.

Catherine Foster returns, in the Ruhr, to the role of Isolde with Torsten Kerl in a new production of Tristan und Isolde .

Frank Castorf's controversial but supremely well-cast Ring cycle is provocative to the last.

Visual references both incongruous and perceptive abound in the third instalment of Bayreuth's musically triumphant Ring cycle.

Singing, orchestral playing and scenic portrayal all combine to make a highly memorable second instalment of Wagner's Ring.

Tonight’s Götterdämmerung brought the cycle to a fitting – and wholly American – conclusion. 

Zambello's Ring for the WNO continues to engage and impress. 

At the end, there was a profusion of boos and applause for the creative team: Castorf and co had given us a Ring cycle that was by turns infuriatingly indulgent, interestingly provocative, visually beautiful, puzzling and rewarding.

Castorf's anarchic take on Siegfried pushes well beyond his treatment of the earlier parts of the Ring, and not all the heroics from Stefan Vinke, Wolfgang Koch and Catherine Foster can rescue the evening.

Frank Castorf's Soviet-era farm-setting does not obtrude on the emotional core of Wagner's Die Walküre, with excellent performances from Johan Botha, Anja Kampe and Claudia Mahnke, with superlative playing from the Festival Orchestra.

Deutsche Oper's production of Turandot ends with a double murder. Whatever point director Lorenzo Fioroni may have been trying to make about unhinged power, it failed to solve the problems of the ending of Puccini's opera.

Attila Jun's outstanding Hagen and Catherine Foster's sublime Brünnhilde light up the last episode of Frank Castorf's puzzling Ring.

Catherine Foster's Brünnhilde bathes Bayreuth's Siegfried in a warm glow, while Wolfgang Koch sings a superb Wanderer. But director Frank Castorf does his best to subvert both.

Kirill Petrenko starts Die Walküre with a flourish as Frank Castorf’s staging takes us back to the Baku oilfields in late tsarist Russia.

As the year of Wagner’s bicentennial approaches its end, De Nederlandse Opera concludes its latest revival of Pierre Audi’s Ring cycle with his 1998 production of Götterdämmerung.