Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Marie-Claude Chappuis

How can one focus on the music? Purcell’s music is interspersed with contemporary interludes by Atsushi Sakaï in an overly busy staging.  

A fresh approach to two late Mozart works earned the adulation of a Montreal Symphony Orchestra audience.

Sir Roger Norrington and a strong cast joined a Baroque-style London Philharmonic Orchestra in a highly accomplished Dido and Aeneas, preceded by Handel’s clean and stately Water Music.

Osborn absolutely lives the part; he negotiated formidable heights, intricate passage work and the sheer volume of notes with style and clarity as well as colour and nuance. 

Harding's grasp of the work's architecture that provides overall coherence. That, combined with the pithy, pulsing core he forges at its heart, makes this performance as engaging as it is polished.

Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques perform Alceste, the most recent effort in their almost complete set of Lully's operas. A strong cast and a remarkable chorus complete a successful performance.

Under the baton of René Jacobs, B’rock Orchestra gave an inspired performance  that ought to contribute in giving Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria the place it deserves in the standard repertoire.

At the Theater an der Wien, director Mariame Clément and novelist Lucy Wadham have crafted innovative material that brings the old-fashioned lyrics to life in a coherent and contemporary dramatic setting.

George Frideric Handel’s “Messiah” is pretty much everybody’s favourite Easter oratorio, and it proved no less so for the Zurich audience on Good Friday at the Tonhalle.

Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos was first performed in 1912, in a production directed by Max Reinhardt. Unlike the version usually seen today, this first Ariadne was a long-winded play-opera-ballet hybrid, incorporating a full production of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme with dances to incidental music by Strauss followed by the short opera.