Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Royal Academy of Music

McNicol Ballet Collective celebrates its 5th anniversary with excerpts of three previous successes and a brand new one act ballet.

A lyrical yet zesty account of Mozart's' adorable score, in a production that is on the nose and off the wall. 

Jack Furness serves up an unappetising mess of Humperdinck's delicious masterpiece for Royal Academy Opera. 

With typical spirit, the students at the Royal Academy of Music did an excellent job in bringing Martinů’s Comedy on the Bridge and Alexandre bis to life – two lesser-known pre-war surrealist gems.

Frederic Wake-Walker's realisation of the Hogarth-inspired opera is visually bracing and assuredly sung. 

Students triumph in Tchaikovsky's Iolanta and Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortilèges.

Royal Academy Opera maintains its usual high standards in a production of Handel’s operatic oratorio, a showcase for the singers of the future.

Students from the Royal Academy of Music and Tokyo Geidai join forces for an expedition through Beethoven's Eroica Symphony.

Dove's infectious score nods to Copland, Bernstein and Britten and its tongue-twisting ensembles and high-wire vocal writing were wonderfully performed. 

Does the devil get the best tunes? Nick Shadow steals the show in the Royal Academy's production of The Rake's Progress.

Royal Academy Opera's thoroughly competent Suor Angelica precedes a fabulously entertaining Gianni Schicchi, with a top drawer performance from Haobin Wang in the title role.

Drawing a line of suffering from ancient Rome to Golgotha to the concentration camps, Britten’s blank postcard from Belsen strikes to the heart of humanity. The Rape of Lucretia is brilliantly realised by the Royal Academy of Music.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a Handel opera in pursuit of a happy ending must have a few twists and turns, and Ariodante has everything you would expect.

Christoph von Dohnányi was awarded an honorary doctorate at the Royal Academy of Music, London, and to celebrate he led some of the Academy's students in a performance of Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony.

Over the years, I’ve generally found performances at Royal Academy Opera to be enjoyable and straightforward. This production of Cendrillon went rather beyond that.

Somewhere between a concert and a scientific experiment, tonight’s Tales from Babel at the Royal Academy of Music was a fascinating study into the way we process text and language. Having been given a response handset when we entered the room, the first half of the concert was a rendition of a work by Christopher Fox which gave the concert it’s name; Tales from Babel.

The Royal Academy of Music tonight presented the fruits of their latest postgraduate opera course with two short operas representing opposite ends of the musical timeline.Purcell’s miniature three-act opera really needs no introduction.

Before this chamber performance of Bruckner’s Second Symphony, Trevor Pinnock gave a short introductory talk, pointing out that, before the days of ubiquitous recording, music was always heard live, and chamber arrangements were an important aspect of disseminating music.

For an opera school production, it's a good idea to choose a classic: something that will focus the audience on the quality of the singers and orchestra rather than on innovation in the piece or programming.

One of the consistent joys of seeing a performance by the Royal Academy of Music's opera school is that they bring in world class conductors. At last night's La vera costanza, the orchestra, conducted by Trevor Pinnock, was exceptional.

Turning great novels into opera isn't a new idea - consider Prokofiev's War and Peace or Massenet's Werther - but it can be a tricky business: opera thrives on pace and high drama, while the greatest novels have time and space for reflection and character development.

Die Zauberflöte is probably the greatest singspiel ever composed (only Mozart's own Die Entführung aus dem Serail can compete for beauty), but it is rather difficult to stage because of its highly complicated story and abstruse and rather ambiguous masonic symbolism. But the music sweeps all before it with its extraordinary beauty, quality and variety.

Since moving to London in September, I’ve remained highly impressed and encouraged by the capital’s concert attendance levels. I’ve grown up with constant Doomsday prophesies of the imminent demise of Classical music – I think everyone has, actually.

For a composer of such undeniable genius and widespread popularity, it is strange that there aren’t too many opportunities to hear J.S. Bach’s cantatas performed live in concert.

When you go to a student opera production, even at an institution as prestigious as the Royal Academy of Music, you don't expect to see one of the opera world's conducting legends in the pit. But that's precisely what we had at last night's performance of Berlioz's Béatrice et Bénédict, in the shape of Sir Colin Davis (CH, CBE), a man with several thousand opera performances on the clock.

A handful of times in operatic history, a composer has thrown away the rule book and produced a work which defies categorisation because it simply isn't like anything else in the repertoire. Kurt Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper is one such work: musically and dramatically, neither Weill himself or anyone else has ever written anything remotely similar.

The Royal Academy of Music has a small but beautifully refurbished theatre, the 230 seat Sir Jack Lyons Theatre, where it stages full opera performances. Although many of the seats are taken by Academy staff, performers' friends and families, talent scouts and others with specific reasons for being there, some of the tickets are available to the public.