Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Nicky Spence

Opera Philadelphia commissions ten composers to tell the story of an ordinary woman's idiosyncratic march from cradle to tomb.

An entertaining portrayal of the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs is marred by ham-fisted amplification.

David Pountney's vernacular translation and Ruth Knight's vivid staging lent a thrilling immediacy to Shostakovich's chilling opera.

Damiano Michieletto’s production of Janáček’s opera breaks a key tenet of high-concept opera: where it should reveal, it obfuscates. 

Corinne Winters is phenomenal as the self-possessed Jenůfa in The Royal Opera's revival of Claus Guth's powerful staging. 

The French premiere of the British composer's opera will be the undisputed high point of the Grande Boutique's season: a perfect confluence of music, staging and cast.

Who needs a stage, sets or costumes, when opera can move us like this? Agneta Eichenholz leads a terrific cast in a concert performance of Janáček's searing opera. 

Tenor Nicky Spence and mezzo Václava Krejčí Housková thrill with a theatrical take on Janáček's The Diary of One Who Disappeared with pianist Julius Drake. 

Olivia Fuchs gives a powerful staging of Janáček's morality tale of the perils of eternal youth, with an excellent cast, but there are reservations about the title role.

Breastplates are back in vogue, but comedy horses and cheap production values undermine the first chapter in English National Opera's new Ring cycle. 

Guth's intelligent production comes with a Karita Mattila masterclass and an outstanding cast, intense to the point of pain. 

Glyndebourne's 2021 season opens with an intense, minimalist staging of Janáček’s tale of adultery, focused on the contrasts between its heroine's dreams and reality.

Barry goes for out-weirding Carroll at a fast and furious pace. There's plenty of fun and it's beautifully staged – but is that enough?

At a time when the “relevance” is bandied around all too frequently in relation to opera, Martinů's really does deserve that tag. 

Dmitri Tcherniakov's staging turns Rimsky-Korsakov's opera into storytelling for an autistic boy, but does he deliver a fairy tale ending? 

Daniel Kramer’s direction is a model of restraint compared to some of his earlier work for the company.

The tone was set for a shrewdly programmed hour of contrasts.

Johan Reuter is gripping in Krzysztof Warlikowski's powerful vision of the universal, timeless horrors of prison, but visual clutter distracts from Janáček’s music.

The finale of the BBCSO’s Bernstein celebration features the composer at his most sublime and frivolous, and offers a rare performance of Songfest for six soloists and orchestra.

Problems of orchestral balance cloud Olivia Fuchs's straightforward, compelling staging of Janáček’s tirade against the rigidity and hypocrisy of small town society.

Grange Park Opera scored a direct hit with a fine production of Janáček's masterpiece, led by a superb performances from Natalya Romaniw and Susan Bullock as Jenůfa and the Kostelnička.

The Hallé's oddly-ordered Ring arrives at the beginning with Das Rheingold.

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.

In Janáček's searing excoriation of small town social mores, superb orchestra, singing and acting make this revival of David Alden's Jenůfa into an unmissable evening of opera.

Stimulating sounds from the Academy of Ancient Music in late night Bach at the Proms. 

The task sounded Herculean: turning Benvenuto Cellini, that reputedly difficult, flawed work by Berlioz, into an utterly entertaining show that renders justice to its youthfully energetic music. This is what Terry Gilliam manages to pull off... and it is nothing short of miraculous.

A Child Of Our Time brought this year's Auckland Arts Festival to a magnificent finish with its message as universal as it was when first composed. 

With ENO having been in the news for all the wrong reasons last week,  it needed Richard Jones' The Mastersingers of Nuremberg to be a great production. Lit up by a towering performance by Iain Paterson, it is.

A colour-coded Mosè in Egitto uses the paintings of Marc Chagall to inspire the costumes for the Jews and the Egyptians in this production of a Rossinian rarity.

Welsh National Opera's new production of Rossini's William Tell shows off orchestra and chorus to their full under Carlo Rizzi's baton

“He’s not an opera director. He’s a very naughty boy!” Three years after his surreal Damnation of Faust, Terry Gilliam tackles more Berlioz for English National Opera in the shape of Benvenuto Cellini, striking gold again.

Benjamin Britten’s 100th birthday was celebrated on Thursday at the Berlin Konzerthaus with a spectacular performance of his seminal War Requiem.

When you think chic, black-tie country house opera, you probably don’t also think sixteen barefoot nuns being executed. Grange Park Opera’s fusion of these two contrasting ideas, however, has a lot going for it: their production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites combines its minimal but effective staging with some impressive singing.

This Richard Thomas Foundation concert at Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room introduced us to two completely new works, and presented two slightly older pieces too for good measure. All were beautifully played by a top selection of performers, making for an excellent demonstration of the power of new music.

In Harry Fehr’s much-anticipated new production of The Flying Dutchman for Scottish Opera, the setting is in Scotland – as Wagner had originally intended before a last-minute switch to Norway during rehearsals for the first production in 1843.

Andris Nelsons followed up his 2012 Tristan und Isolde with a stirring performance of Wagner’s breakthrough work, Der fliegende Holländer, with a fine array of soloists and the CBSO in Birmingham. At a little over two hours, The Flying Dutchman is one of Wagner’s shorter operas, but it shares its supernatural themes with many of his other works.

Following acclaimed productions at Scottish Opera of The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville, recently revived, Thomas Allen returns to Glasgow to direct The Magic Flute.

Leeds Lieder+, the northern biennial festival of art song, began on Friday night with Bright is the Ring of Words. Advertised as a celebration of British verse, the evening featured settings of the words of Lord Byron, Robert Louis Stevenson and Shakespeare by a diverse range of composers including Mendelssohn, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Richard Strauss, Roger Quilter and John Dankworth.

It's about time someone wrote an opera about the internet. And who better than Nico Muhly - snarky blogger, snappy Tweeter, and according to the Daily Telegraph "the hottest young composer around"? Add seasoned playwright Craig Lucas, top Broadway director Bartlett Sher and some of Britain's finest singers, and you might expect them to cook up a success.

Intermezzo is an opera based on the real life happenings in the relationship between Richard Strauss and his wife Pauline, characterised on stage as Robert and Christine Storch. Maestro Robert takes on a long conducting stint in Vienna, leaving Christine in her country house with their eight year old son Franzl, and a retinue of staff.

Donné pour la première fois à l'Opéra national de Paris, l'ouvrage du compositeur américain est un succès sur le plan musical, théâtral et chorégraphique.

Même si certains procédés du metteur en scène italien restent incompréhensibles voire agacent, force est de constater que ses débuts dans la Tétralogie bruxelloise sont une réussite.

La mise en scène lourdingue d'Àlex Ollé est heureusement compensée par l'interprétation musicale, portée par une distribution, un orchestre, un chœur et un chef inspirés.

Dans un programme original et somptueux, le jeune chef tchèque fait un retour remarqué auprès de l'Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France.

L'opéra peu connu de Rimsky-Korsakov bénéficie de la géniale mise en scène de Dmitri Tcherniakov et d'une distribution de toute beauté.

La production de l'année pour l'Opéra de Lyon ! Warlikowski livre une interprétation particulièrement efficace du chef-d'œuvre de Janáček, entre parabole poétique et réalisme cru.

En guise d'ouverture de saison à l'Opéra de Paris, le Tristan de Peter Sellars et Bill Viola laisse les wagnériens sur leur faim, malgré un grand Philippe Jordan.

Calixto Bieito, fiel a su estilo y tradición, se entrega a mostrar la caída en desgracia de la protagonista de Die Soldaten del modo más directo y descarnado posible.