Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Geoffrey Dolton

In the first and last acts, ladies entered with a train still attached to a bolt of cloth, which was then cut to length by an attendant. Was this production brought to the stage in a great hurry, allowing no time for costume fittings? 

Opera North's triumphant UK première production of Silent Night by Kevin Puts is directed at Leeds Town Hall by Tim Albery and conducted by Nicholas Kok.

Giles Havergal directs and Martin André conducts an energetic production of Franz Léhar's The Merry Widow at the Grand Theatre, Leeds.

Weill's neglected "American Opera" opens in Madrid with a refurbished production by John Fulljames and a strong cast led by Patricia Racette.

Garsington's latest Rossini buffa is on the nail orchestrally, mixed vocally and one of the best pieces of acting and stage movement you'll see in opera.

William Kentridge's Lulu for ENO is easier to admire than it is to love. But if you want to be challenged dramatically, this is the opera to do it.

Calixto Bieito  updates the Carmen to the final years of Franco’s dictatorship and in Joan Anton Rechi’s revival, the results are often gritty and fierce, if unlikely to do anything for the Spanish tourist trade.

Vert-Vert, undoubtedly the only opera named after a dead parrot, is a very, very silly opera – more a series of comic sketches than an integrated work. But in Garsington's production, everything delights.

There was an element of scenic continuity between the lush greenery and positively balmy Holland Park evening surrounding us, and the staging of Opera Holland Park’s production of L’elisir d’amore: in the background, a large greenhouse full of the brightest sunflowers; in the foreground, sunflowers dotted about the stage, and the back ends of two lorries plastered with a large image of a field of

Interviewed at the Barbican Centre last year, Stephen Fry described Gerald Barry’s score for The Importance of Being Earnest (2010) rather unfavourably as “taking a machete to a soufflé”. However, this zany opera based on Oscar Wilde’s classic play of 1895 has already emerged victorious from concert premières in Los Angeles and London.

The West End/Broadway musical is alive and well, raking in millions with its blend of light music, song and dance routines and not-too-taxing drama. But its spiritual ancestor, the operetta, is an unfashionable beast.

What clever scheduling by Opera North. In the centre of Leeds the snow is turning grey and slushy, the temperature is ridiculously low and it's dark before mid-afternoon, but inside The Grand Theatre it's a different story- a story which seems specifically designed to lift the winter blues.