En vivo, Video: Buscador de críticas de conciertos de música clásica, ópera, ballet y danza | Gianluca Marcianò

Verdi's most political of operas brilliantly highlights the juxtaposition of personal desires and political imperatives

Grange Park Opera’s enjoyable new production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera looks a little homespun on stage, but has plenty of musical compensations.

Woefully stiff acting lets down an otherwise excellent production; Joseph Calleja impresses in his role début as Cavaradossi.

Strong vocal and orchestral performances and a tour-de-force staging of Act II light up Grange Park's production of Verdi's political thriller of the dark days of the Spanish inquisition.

Stephen Medcalf's meticulous staging of Tchaikovsky's bitter masterpiece is lit up by Jung Soo Yun's Lensky, giving a direct injection of emotions: verismo before its time.

Grange Park’s Samson et Dalila doesn’t hit the bull’s eye, but it’s well worth the visit for a decent all-round staging of an unfamiliar work, an excellent rendering of its sumptuous score and for a thrilling piece of singing by Carl Tanner.

ENO's revival of Jonathan Miller's 2009 production is musically solid, but falls short of the dramatic intensity achieved in previous years.

Opera North's La Traviata at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, makes an excellent start to Opera North's new season.

Stylish, intelligent and visceral, with a magnetic central performance by Claire Rutter, Grange Park give us a powerful, tough La traviata updated to 1950s Hollywood.

To describe this revival of Puccini's much-loved Madam Butterfly as a visual spectacle would be to do it a disservice. Originally directed by Anthony Minghella in its first outing in 2005, it is one of ENO's greatest success stories.

Alzira, Verdi’s eighth opera, is something of a discarded child within his canon, not least because of Verdi’s own dismissal of it as “proprio brutta” (really ugly) after it was poorly received both in Naples and Rome. Perhaps Verdi was stung by a blot on an otherwise successful career: on the basis of last night’s concert performance by Chelsea Opera Group, the score has plenty to commend it.

With programming in the major opera houses dominated by Verdi and Wagner, bel canto fans have had a slightly thin time of it this year (Covent Garden’s La donna del lago is an exception). But others are filling some of the gaps, with Rossini’s Maometto II coming up at Garsington and Stephen Langridge’s production of Bellini’s I Puritani, which opened at Grange Park last night.

If your favourite part of opera is a soaring melody which stays in your head long after the opera is over, they don’t come much better than Un bel dì in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, in which our enraptured heroine sings of the day that her husband’s ship will reappear on the horizon. At Grange Park last night, Claire Rutter did it full justice.