Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Janina Baechle

Leading five choirs, fine soloists and a glowing Netherlands Philharmonic, conductor Marc Albrecht emphasised the human struggle in a highly dramatic performance of Mahler’s mammoth eighth symphony.

Wagner demands vocal resilience from the large cast of singers in Das Rheingold, but Willy Decker wants strong thigh muscles as well.

The Wiener Staatsoper revives a beautiful production of Daphne that juxtaposes myth, dream and reality, with brilliant vocal performances by the two leads.

Music-making in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt/Terezín continues to fascinate, baffle and inspire us.

Mehta's refusal to treat these as episodic statements gave the playing its polish. The music unravelled in a spun-out yarn.

Vienna Staatsoper revived Wagner's Ring Cycle with a splendid orchestral performance of Das Rheingold led by Sir Simon Rattle.

With his one act opera The Rise of Spinoza Theo Loevendie wrought an attractive opera, that may well become part of the repertoire

Thunderous applause, numerous curtain calls; Stoyanova, Bĕlohlávek and a strong cast enjoy a fairy-tale reception in Sven-Bechtolf´s new production of Dvorak's Rusalka at the Vienna Staatsoper.

Think of all the adjectives typically used to report on the best of female Wagner singing; add lyrical phrasing and imagine the absence of any shrillness, and you have come as close as possible to a description of the perfection that Nina Stemme achieved in her first Isolde for the Wiener Staatsoper.

Born in 1920 to a Venetian bandmaster, Bruno Maderna became famous during his formative years as a violin prodigy and was told by his grandfather that he could gravitate to the mafia later in life and God would still look kindly on one who played the violin so wonderfully.

When Richard Strauss first wrote Salome, he was unable to get it performed in his home city of Vienna, so shocking was the material with its heavy eroticism and necrophiliac ending (the première was in Dresden). A century on, times are more permissive, and Salome features in the seasons both of Vienna's Volksoper and of the Staatsoper, where we saw it last night.