En vivo, A la carta, Evento en directo: Buscador de críticas de conciertos de música clásica, ópera, ballet y danza | Timothy Robinson

In Siberian conditions more akin to The Winter's Tale, a revival of Robert Carsen's season setting of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream offered a warm glow at the Coliseum.

A slick production from the Garsington Opera Company, who use the location of the Wormley Estate to their full advantage. 

An operatic take on The Winter's Tale – categorised as one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’ – premieres at English National Opera. 

Mozart's messy monster of an opera gets a brutalist tidy-up at Garsington, but the determinedly straightforward reading only makes this work's innate problems more obvious. 

For anyone seeing Carmen for the first time, this Royal Opera revival will have been a more than satisfactory evening. Old hands hoping to see something extra will find it in Hymel's Don José and Car's Micaëla, but not elsewhere.

Glyndebourne's season opener features an outstanding singing performance by baritone Igor Golovatenko, leading a strong vocal cast. However, staging and orchestral performance leave much to be desired.

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.

La finta giardiniera isn't one of Mozart's greatest operas. But this is about as good a production of it as I can imagine and makes for a deliciously light-hearted evening. 

A suitably rustic account of Janáček’s tale: seductive, engaging, and with a sense of intimacy ideal for this small venue.

In the revival of David Alden's Peter Grimes at English National Opera, the singing is excellent, the orchestral performance is out of the top drawer and the staging hardly puts a foot wrong.

Conductor H.K. Gruber’s visits to the BBC Philharmonic are guaranteed to be unmissable concerts of the season; with unquenchable enthusiasm and pride in the music he programmes, Gruber, (known affectionately to all as “Nali”), always assures a stirring performance.

Professional performances of English operas are rare – they always have been – and it is presumably the 60th anniversary of The Pilgrim’s Progress specifically that has prompted this 2012 revival. It seems that without a significant anniversary to justify blowing the dust off a score, English operas tend to lie unheeded – the exception of course is Benjamin Britten.