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An icy Götterdämmerung brings Opera Australia's Ring Cycle to a successful conclusion, with standout performances from Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Andrea Silvestrelli as Hagen.

The tireless Stefan Vinke wows in the title role of Opera Australia's Siegfried, in a production which harnesses technology to excellent effect.

With Iréne Theorin's Brünnhilde rejuvenated, the Ring receives a worthy finale at the Budapest Wagner Days.

Two sopranos bring intensity and tenderness to Strauss’ powerful opera in a revival of the timeless production by Patrice Chéreau.

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

Müpa's Ring sees all-round musical excellence for a third night in row, which will be remembered more than the various distracting miscues in the staging.

Having offered a strong feminist reading of Wagner's Ring, could Kasper Holten do the same again for Die Meistersinger? Opera Australia's co-production had moments of excellence, but ultimately left the viewer with more questions than answers

A standout performance from Stephen Milling complements all-round excellence of cast to provide a satisfying end to the Covent Garden Ring.

Wagner's storytelling shines brightly with the aid of a cast well out of the ordinary. Vinke, Stemme, Siegel and Lundgren make part 3 of The Ring an unforgettable evening of opera.

Claus Guth’s grandiose production of Parsifal made major headlines in Zurich in 2011. With its new cast of principals, this revival is no less a sensation.

The 2011 Lyon production, with an excellent orchestral and vocal performance, brings an austerely moonlit version of Tristan und Isolde to Barcelona.

What distinguishes Noseda's Tristan most of all is especial balance in the orchestra and a transparency of sound that reveals the inner-workings of the music.

Stefan Vinke was a convincing, petulant, pouty Siegfried in the third episode in Wagner's Ring cycle in Vienna.

Powerful performances in Götz Friedrich's Deutsche Oper production. 

The final instalment of the Melbourne Ring is vividly brought to life by excellent singing, an adaptable set, and committed playing from the pit.

A combination of ingenious sets, truly heroic singing in the title role by Stefan Vinke, and excellence throughout the rest of the cast makes the Melbourne Siegfried an unmissible highlight of the Ring so far.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s impressive conducting, Tomasz Konieczny’s tortured Telramund and the Chor der Wiener Staatsoper save this performance of  Lohengrin from becoming an ignominious swan song.

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.

Nobody at Carnegie Hall last night could recall a Wagner concert so gigantic, so thrilling, or so special. 

Oper Leipzig served up Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen as the closing piece of its Wagner Festtage “Frühe Werke”. 

Alan Gilbert conducts Sibelius and Mahler at the helm of the New York Philharmonic. 

Bringing out the unabashed colour and detail of the score, Andrew Davis delivered a superb reading in the pit, tightly coherent and with exemplary attentiveness to articulation. 

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.

Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos amuses in a concert version put on by the Deutsche Oper at the Philharmonie in Berlin, with good performances from Meagan Miller (Ariadne) and Susanne Elmark (Zerbinetta).

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.

Wagner famously idealized the concept of the “Gesamtkunstwerk”, a total work of art that incorporates many artistic media into a single piece. He would have appreciated Seattle Opera’s production of Götterdämmerung.

Seattle Opera’s Siegfried takes place in familiar territory. Mime lives in the part of the forest where the gods roamed in Das Rheingold, and the dragon has made its lair where Hunding and Siegmund fought in Die Walküre (there’s even a bloodstain on the rock, which the Wanderer touches regretfully).

Monumental in scale and scope, Götterdämmerung is a work to which it is hard to be indifferent. For many, the idea of an evening of fantasy opera lasting nearly seven hours is unimaginable, so uncongenial is the subject material and so great the attention span demanded.

Korngold’s Die tote Stadt is an extraordinary opera, an often underrated masterpiece of the 20th century. On the face of it, it has a simple plot – the protagonist Paul, unable to overcome the death of his wife, falls in love with another woman, Marietta, similar to his dead wife in many ways.

Leipzig routinely honours its native son with performances of Parsifal scheduled on and around Good Friday, which tempts a state of ritualized enactment best confined to the opera itself. (Vienna maintains the same tradition and is a magnet for self-appointed enforcers of the Bayreuth applause customs and their confrontational silencing of the ‘transgressors’.

As you round the corner of Prince Consort Road, you raise your head to catch a glimpse of the tip of the Royal Albert Hall dome. But just as you do…SMACK! You’ve collided with a stranger’s back. Reorienting yourself you realise there’s a queue a mile long, winding down the steps outside the Royal Albert Hall and stretching all the way to bus stop down the road.

In spite of Mahler's disapproval, his eighth symphony is forever tagged as the "Symphony of a Thousand" because of the immense choirs which perform it.

Calixto Bieitos eigenwillige Sichtweise rundete sich mit Ulf Schirmers Dirigat zu einem Epos zwischen Melancholie und Apokalypse.

Ein herausragender Kirill Petrenko und eine exzellente Besetzung machen auch den letzten Abend von Wagners Rings an der Bayerischen Staatsoper zum hörenswerten Erlebnis. 

Die Bayerische Staatsoper hat mit Richard Wagners Siegfried in der Inszenierung von Andreas Kriegenburg den Ring-Zyklus mit fabelhafter Besetzung fortgesetzt.

La Sinfónica de Galicia fue la gran triunfadora de la noche con una combinación magistral de fuerza y sensibilidad. 

Der Gürzenich-Chor Köln und die Neue Philharmonie Westfalen erreichen unter Christian Jeubs Führung das gelobte Land.