Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Tomislav Lavoie

Berlioz' oratorio provides a welcome alternative to the usual Christmastime Messiah at the Maison symphonique. 

It's a big night at the Opéra Bastille for their 350th anniversary season; Oropesa's dazzling coloratura stops the show; Andreas Kriegenburg sets the action interestingly in a Star Trek future.

Richard Wagner, reviewing La Reine de Chypre for the Dresden Abend-Zeitung, praised Halévy's opera as “decidedly the best that has appeared on the Opéra's boards since Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots”. It's impossible not to agree. 

Cologne Opera's staging of Ravel's two comedies needed a stronger directorial response to the performance space, but the musical rewards compensated.

Québec play of illicit love transformed into a memorable Opéra de Montréal world premiere.

A traditionally staged Le Pré aux clercs fresh from Paris' Opéra Comique is presented with colour and joie de vivre.

Antonio Vivaldi’s three-act opera seria Motezuma was created in Venice in 1733 (months after Handel’s extraordinary Orlando in London) but was thought lost until a manuscript turned up in Germany in 2002. The story is a romanticized and fanciful adaptation of the destruction of Motezuma’s Aztec empire in Mexico by the Spanish armies of Fernando Cortés in the early 16th century.