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The Vienna Philharmonic's first concert at this year's Salzburg Festival pairs Oedipus Rex with the Symphonie fantastique, with Esa-Pekka Salonen stepping in for Lorenzo Viotti. 

Sunday bells call the Salzburg Festival pilgrims to the Großes Festspielhaus for late choral Verdi and Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. 

At the Salzburg Festival, Savall pairs two of Beethoven's most revolutionary symphonies in fiery performances. 

Krzysztof Warlikowski’s ghoulish production has the Macbeths’ killing spree spring from their infertility.

Martin Kušej gives Mozart and Da Ponte's commedia per musica a sinister mafia setting, which is low on laughs but outstandingly performed, led by Lea Desandre's charismatic Cherubino.

Asmik Grigorian is captivating in an unobtrusive production of Puccini's three one-act operas. Under Franz Welser-Möst, the Vienna Philharmonic is on top form.

Romeo Castellucci's intense production of Bartók's opera reaps its rewards in the performance under Teodor Currentzis, but Carl Orff's opera-oratorio De temporum fine comoedia feels little more than a drab filler. 

With duets from Pique Dame and Iolanta, along with set pieces from Eugene Onegin, this gala was packed with Russian passion. 

Forget powerhouse “hojotohos” and sandblasting brass. Elīna Garanča and Christian Thielemann offered more intimate portraits of these composers at the Großes Festspielhaus.

The duo shines in sunny Beethoven, cool Prokofiev and over-ripe Franck.

“Go big or go home” could easily have been the motto of this summer’s festival. Muti didn’t just go big. He went huge. 

In a pandemic era of chamber reductions, the joy in this Mahler 6 was hearing an orchestra of 108 musicians let off the leash. 

It's difficult to believe Salzburg could have cast a finer Così in Loy's Covid-reduced production in the Großes Festspielhaus.

An Elektra conducted like Mendelssohnian fairy music, sung not shouted, just as Strauss required.

A wonderful cast conducted by William Christie in a new production of L’incoronazione di Poppea at the Salzburg Festival. 

Mariss Jansons and the Vienna Philharmonic do the real storytelling as Hans Neuenfels' staging underwhelms.

An astonishing performance by Asmik Grigorian is central to the Italian director's disturbing reading of a disturbing opera. 

Cecilia Bartoli is joined by frequent collaborators Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier in a fun-filled Rossini farce full of Italian sunshine. Big grins all round. 

Muti's reading of the score is extraordinary, both for its sophistication and originality.

A skilfully constructed production, and one that plays with the our perspectives. Whether the images are flashbacks from a war-troubled Wozzeck or a Büchner-esque portent of the horrors to come is left for the audience to decide.

Youth was a hindrance rather than a virtue in this testosterone-driven performance which sought more than anything to sock the audience between the eyes

Under Mariss Jansons, the Vienna Philharmonic are on top form in Shostakovich's opera; together with a top class cast of singers, they create sonic and emotional intoxication.

The final opera in Sir John Eliot Gardiner's Monteverdi 450 trilogy features an excellent cast and inspires deep emotion.

Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, the second opera of the Monteverdi 450 trilogy being toured by Sir John Eliot Gardiner, had a strong performance in Salzburg.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner's Monteverdi 450 trilogy began its Salzburg run with a tear-jerking concert performance of L'Orfeo.

A nameless octet competes with the big names and easily wins the silver medal in Salzburg.

The multinational Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra proves that adolescence is no barrier to maturity in profound symphonic music making.

According to director Sven-Eric Bechtolf,  Don Giovanni’s divine retribution for a life of pure evil and insatiable fornication is just more of the same.

In a concert career lasting over 35 years, Murray Perahia has been a guest soloist with many orchestras. But his engagement with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields is a special one, since he is also the orchestra’s principal guest conductor, and their playing is so immaculate that not even technichal issues can distract from an incredible performance.

Peter Stein stages Schubert's problem opera Fierrabras in a world of cardboard knights. This last opera of the Salzburg Festival is well sung, but you have to ask: is the last always the best?

If you recognize how Maurizio Pollini walks onto the stage, you can probably gauge his mood – which this evening was particularly restless. I have always wondered why he reaches the piano so quickly and almost immediately begins to play. Invariably, he has a puzzled expression on his face, as if he were wondering what all these spectators are doing in the hall – I love this shyness.

High above the Salzach’s east bank towers the Hotel Sacher, and atop it for the last few days has been an unusual standard: the flag of Venezuela.

The Coro de Manos Blancas (White Hands Choir) of Venezuela, one of the leading group of the Special Education Programme, was founded by Johnny Gómez in 1995 to include children and young adults with disabilities. The White Hands Choir is part of the National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras and Choirs, known as “El Sistema”.

The Percussive Planet Ensemble was founded seven years ago, when the then 22-year-old Martin Grubinger first performed his Percussive Planet (twelve percussion pieces from around the world) at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn.

Faith and glamour have bookended this year’s Salzburg Festival, a move met with incredulity in certain quarters and yet one not entirely alien to Austrian customs, if one looks to the 20 or so most glittering events of the Viennese ball season, which is promptly curtailed by Ash Wednesday (still observed by much of the population here with high Catholic asceticism).

Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw can claim the most enduring historical connection with Mahler’s symphonies of any orchestra due to their erstwhile principal conductor Willem Mengelberg, who invited Mahler to Amsterdam to conduct the Third and Fourth Symphonies in 1903 and 1904 respectively and after the composer’s death became one of his chief disciples.

The German thinker Theodor Adorno once wrote that a musical setting of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, considered in its own literary right a masterpiece, may well have proved redundant.

Giulio Cesare, an opera populated with manipulative characters that only interact with each other when shared interests are at stake, is a receptive vessel for a scornful indictment of imperialism and the dubious alliances it forges.

The Vienna Philharmonic has received a mixed reception at the Proms in recent years, but this programme of Beethoven and Bruckner with Murray Perahia and Bernard Haitink, which was performed in Salzburg this weekend and tours to London next week, will be sure to be met with critical approval.There were however moments during the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no.

Established in 1987 by Leonard Bernstein, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra last year joined the exclusive club of youth orchestras to have performed at the Salzburg Festival and was immediately invited back for a return appearance this season.

When Salzburg Festival director Alexander Pereira stepped onto the stage of the Großes Festspielhaus last night to announce that one of the cast members of La bohème was sick and unable to sing, he faced a chorus of hisses from the audience. Soprano Anna Netrebko, the festival’s biggest non-conductor star, was feeling fine (though as Mimì she would shortly die of consumption).

Strauss’ Don Juan has a long tradition as one of the Vienna Philharmonic’s more dazzling curtain-openers but a recent tendency, even with Gustavo Dudamel, who conducted this work with the orchestra last autumn, has been for more subdued accounts which downplay the brilliance and virtuosity of the orchestral writing.

The new Zauberflöte at this summer’s Salzburg Festival is a visually brilliant production with sets tailored to the atmospheric venue of the Felsenreitschule (for people not familiar with Salzburg, this is where the singing contest was held in the film The Sound of Music).

The baritone Thomas Hampson is a popular figure at the Salzburg Festival, having appeared there regularly since 1988, and at his Lieder recital with pianist Wolfram Rieger at the Haus der Mozart, one sensed a warm rapport between him and the audience. His programme consisted of Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 39, Dvořák’s Zigeunermelodien and Mahler’s songs based on the text of Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos was first performed in 1912, in a production directed by Max Reinhardt. Unlike the version usually seen today, this first Ariadne was a long-winded play-opera-ballet hybrid, incorporating a full production of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme with dances to incidental music by Strauss followed by the short opera.

Il rè pastore was the last operatic work that Mozart completed before Idomeneo, and though there is a clear shift in style and level of achievement in the six years that separate them, it is very interesting to compare the 19-year-old composer to the later operatic master that we are more familiar with.

Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal began their collaboration on Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow) with utopian ambitions. Unfortunately they weren’t the same ones. For Hofmannsthal, this would finally be the opera where his poetry would be illuminated by rather than buried under the music.

Die Wiener Philharmoniker und Yannick Nézet-Séguin widmen sich bei den Salzburger Festspielen ganz exklusiv Richard Wagner – mit feinen Details, aber gemischten Sängerleistungen.