Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Daniel Norman

Rodula Gaitanou sets Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's comedy in the Cinecittà film studios of the 1950s. 

A memorable performance makes a worthy memorial to the late, great Bernard Haitink, who conducted the production's premiere. 

Amid all the18th-century flummery, contemporary touches abound as the OHP's post-pandemic season opens. 

Simon McBurney's production of The Magic Flute continues to delight and this revival benefits from a strong cast, led by the superb Lucy Crowe as Pamina.

ENO's new production of Salome which opens the season features some commendable music-making, but is let down by a flawed concept and dull staging.

A spirited and seamless production of Strauss’s Ariadne is aided by some excellent singing and playing at London’s premier summer opera festival.

Emily Howard's new opera, an Aldeburgh Festival commission, takes an ambitiously modernist approach to a dystopian story of loneliness: a tough, but thought-provoking work. 

Antony McDonald’s take on Ariadne auf Naxos, a co-production from Scottish Opera and Opera Holland Park, sparkles with wit. 

A Haydn choral sandwich and meaty Mozart filling served up by the RPO, the pianist Llŷr Williams, City of London Choir and Hilary Davan Wetton.

In a concert of two halves, Worcester Cathedral experiences unforgettable pain and pleasure in works by Strauss, Rasch and Janáček.

At the opera’s great climaxes Suffolk’s famous wood-and-brick building could barely contain it.

Scottish Opera’s production of Philip Glass and Christopher Hampton's The Trial says less about Kafka’s vision of an absurd world and more about the absurdity of contemporary operatic conventions.

An excellent performance of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s The Last Supper receiving its Scottish première, with Roderick Williams and Susan Bickley heading a luxury cast.

Opera North's production of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd, directed by Orpha Phelan, is a tense psychological drama which puts the emphasis on issues of democracy and attitudes to dictatorship. 

Jenůfa unfurls with chilling intensity at Longborough with the talented Lee Bisset in the title role. 

“Honour your masters!” Sachs instructs Walther in the final scene. Wagner's spirit was honoured well as Glyndebourne's festival opened, but did the song contest necessarily crown the right winner?  

Opera North's Andrea Chénier at Leeds Grand Theatre directed by Annabel Arden is full of modern relevance and a fine start to the new season

Tragedy giving way to comedy – a recipe which still works, as demonstrated in Opera North's fine double bill of Gianni Schicchi and La vida breve.

"Glorious Bach" offered up exactly what it said on the tin as Royal Northern Sinfonia, with their guest conductor, baroque specialist, Laurence Cummings delivered some of Bach’s happiest music in a radiant and unfussy way.

Opera North's static production of Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea directed by Tim Albery takes place in a murderous psychopath’s private cellar. 

Opera North's La traviata at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, makes an excellent start to Opera North's new season.

This BAM production of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, imported from Glyndebourne, achieves the rare distinction of making a great performance out of a decidedly mediocre work.

In spite of the fact that a Handel oratorio, however renowned, provides limited opportunities for staging, this production of Joshua, directed by Charles Edwards, is a largely successful exercise in the art of the possible.

Venturing into the Paris of the 1910s and 1920s, the Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival continues its journey through a brambly thicket of 20th-century music. Sunday’s programme focused on the output of Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer who famously engendered riotous uproar at the Paris Opera House in 1913 with his savage ballet Le sacre du printemps.

Raymond Gubbay Ltd loads the grey interregnum between Christmas and New Year at the Barbican with sundry spectacular delights, such as The Last Night of the Christmas Proms, The Sound of Musicals, Movie Music Classics, and building to the great climax of A Viennese New Year’s Eve Gala. In the midst of this extravaganza stands the Beethoven’s Ninth concert.

When Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala in 1904, it was heavily booed. Few who attended that disastrous first performance could have imagined that, more than one hundred years on, it would have evolved into one of the most enduringly popular and widely performed operas in the world.