Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Albina Shagimuratova

This is the 27th Donizetti opera given the Opera Rara treatment and their ability to spot a hidden gem remains as adroit as ever. 

Strong vocal talent rules the night, and a late moment of visual splendor caps off a serviceable reading of a battered warhorse.

Complete performances of Semiramide are as rare as hen's teeth. Opera Rara came close in a terrific concert performance in the Hanging Gardens of Kensington.

An amiable revival of John Dexter's Die Entführung at The Metropolitan Opera makes Mozart’s Singspiel accessible and genial.

Kasper Holten's virtuosic staging is revived by the Royal Opera with a cast of three exceptionally strong women, and accomplished performances by Christopher Maltman and Alex Esposito as the Don and his servant.

The Met's revival of Lucia di Lammermoor was a collaborative success, with singers, orchestra and chorus cohering well.  

Rachmaninov's The Bells proved the highlight of Prom 43, with fabulous soloists and huge choral forces who stole the show in the third movement.

The newly built and unconventionally imposing Coventry Cathedral, built next to the ruins of the original medieval building destroyed in the Second World War, played host to the first performance of Britten’s War Requiem in 1962.

How, I wonder, is it best for an opera company to treat a revival of a well-aired, well-liked, decent but not particularly radical production of a top ten opera? This was what the Royal Opera had to contend with in this season’s revival of David McVicar’s 2003 setting of Die Zauberflöte: many in the audience will have known every note of the opera, and several will have been thoroughly familiar wi

Of all the mischievous dramatic reversals that line Rigoletto’s plot – the hunchbacked jester tricked into abducting his own daughter, the daughter tricked into loving the brainless Duke (posing as a penniless student), and the terrifying reunion of father and daughter in a scene of murder – is not the most breathtaking, after all, the fact that the opera begins with a convincing display of the de

The San Francisco Opera, one of the big American houses that has exhibited commendable fiscal resourcefulness while maintaining its artistic standards, selected a conservative opener for its 90th season with a revival of its de Chirico-inspired production of Rigoletto.

In keeping with its summer season of novelties, San Francisco Opera have produced a new English-language production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. Advertisements for the production showed baritone Nathan Gunn in a green, full-body leotard as a sort of frogman of a Papageno, leaping in the air and wearing a manic expression.