Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Die Walküre: Ride of the Valkyries

Excerpts from Wagner's opus magnum, minus the singing, along with a Rossini overture and a new work by local composer Lachlan Skipworth make for an enjoyable concert by the larger forces of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. 

This concert, with a running time of about two hours, was a lovely dip in the Rhine without the usual four-to-five hour Wagnerian full immersion.

Maestro Jordan did not present a cut down version of the score. Every instrument Wagner called for was on stage, even the six harps, but the only sung piece was Brünnhilde’s Immolation. 

Celebrating Youth, Music and Education in Roof-Raising Style: Ten Pieces Secondary comes to the BBC Proms 

To celebrate its 50th birthday Dutch National Opera put on a festive tribute to the people that have made it the innovative and much-admired house it is today.

The BBC Concert Orchestra and Barry Wordsworth were joined by Stile Antico, Jack Liebeck and Christine Rice in an exploration of the musical mind of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. 

Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony bring Beethoven and Wagner to Madrid and fill the hall with vitality.

The Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra fizzes with energy and excitement, but Dudamel too often pushes them to extremes.

German tenor Klaus Florian Vogt gave a delightful recital of Wagner, Mozart and operatta, aided by excellent playing by Staatskapelle Weimer.

In his 2011 book Verdi and/or Wagner, currently doing the rounds in libraries across the UK for obvious reasons, Peter Conrad devotes the best of 400 pages to essentially draw all sorts of divisive lines: the sensual Italian song versus the cerebral German symphony; the radically different conceptions of tragedy (“Tragedy in Wagner is an act of will […] Verdi’s characters, unlike Wagner’s, would p

As the audience assembled in Roy Thomson Hall on Wednesday, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Members of the orchestra were taking their seats on the stage, getting ready to tune their instruments. However, anyone paying close attention to the setting would have seen a fixture hanging high above the stage.

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra really has the perfect Wagner sound. Their full, vibrant string tone and magnificent pealing brass were fully in evidence in a thrilling rendition of the concert version of the overture from Tannhäuser. Few moments in music are as exciting as the build-up to the Big Tune in this piece, and the orchestra’s performance here was barnstorming yet perfectly accurate.