Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Darren Jeffery

A fine singing cast gives creditable performances in Johann Stauss II's most famous operetta, but Paul Curran's updating of Act 2 to 1930s Berlin takes the fizz out of the Champagne.

Musgrave's powerful depiction of a powerful woman at the mercy of male manipulation receives a strong staging from at ENO. 

Some good singing performances can't overcome a dated feeling of Gilbert's humour: the evening improves as the storm clouds gather.

Singing performances are excellent, the staging is well crafted and Stravinsky's eclectic score entertains from start to finish. But it's an evening's opera that doesn't touch the soul.

David Alden's production is a vivid telling of Janáček's devastating village drama. With a terrific cast and a splendid performance from the pit, this revival is an unalloyed artistic success.

A forgettable Hansel and Gretel is the worst offence of Antony McDonald’s leaden staging which returns to Covent Garden. 

A strong opener to Melbourne Opera's all-Australian complete Ring, the first to be performed outside a state capital, in the regional Victorian city of Bendigo.

A strong cast led by Bekhzod Davronov and Gabriella Reyes plus an intense production helps Floris Visser unusual staging of La bohème stand out from the crowd.

An ideal young cast and a thoughtful production bring fresh perspectives to Puccini's tragedy.

In 1724, Handel's Giulio Cesare was a vehicle for star singers Senesino and Francesca Cuzzoni. Maria Sanner and Lucie Chartin step into their shoes with great success for this Opera North revival. 

Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes is a nuanced, gripping tale that should pack an emotional punch. Despite fine moments, Oper Köln's production didn't serve the work. 

Ariadne auf Naxos shines in an ultra-contemporary world of high net worth tantrums at Longborough Festival Opera, complete with glam rock fairies, giant string, and glorious music. 

A decent cast was unable to redeem a fundamentally dull opera that lacks the psycholgical complexity and tension of both the original Graham novel and its famous Hitchcock adaptation.

In Thomas Guthrie’s revival of Sir David McVicar’s sober 2003 production of Mozart’s Singspiel, it was the pantomime elements of the show which registered strongly.

“Honour your masters!” Sachs instructs Walther in the final scene. Wagner's spirit was honoured well as Glyndebourne's festival opened, but did the song contest necessarily crown the right winner?  

A revival of Simon McBurney's 2013 production of The Magic Flute reaches new heights under Mark Wigglesworth's baton.

Annemarie Kremer is a strong-willed, dramatically voiced Butterfly in Laurence Dale’s sensitive production.

From its stunningly filmic opening to its faux-Golgotha finale, the Royal Opera House’s new production of Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny demands our attention. 

With the Philharmonia on top form, a superlative cast and clever touches of direction, this was a truly stunning concert performance of Debussy's only opera.

Garsington Opera takes a comedic approach to Beethoven's Fidelio. The result is amusing and musically strong, but lacking in both dynamic staging and emotional depth.

Classical Opera, with some deft revisions to Süssmayr's recitatives and a superb team of soloists, bring us a Clemenza both powerful and poignant, finally doing justice to Mozart's underrated late opera, composed for the coronation of a Hapsburg king. 

This BAM production of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, imported from Glyndebourne, achieves the rare distinction of making a great performance out of a decidedly mediocre work.

The impressively well-drilled children’s chorus dominates this glittering production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the second component of Opera North’s Festival of Britten. 20 young performers in white, black wings on their fairy shoulders, wind solemnly in and out of the action, assemble in rows, perform versions of callisthenics exercises, and sing beautifully.

The silence at the end of the concert said it all. To have plunged the attention of the entire Royal Albert Hall into utter silence for a whole minute after the music has finished was an impressive feat. Such was the audience response to Mark Padmore’s closing walk down the back of the stage, as Captain Vere.

A great number of works from the bel canto era and before have not found their way into the current operatic repertoire, generally for good reason: many are flawed, dated or just not particularly distinguished. Garsington Opera have just proved to us that Rossini’s Maometto Secondo is not one of those.

The bicentenary of Richard Wagner’s birth is inescapable, and it comes as no surprise that, however brief their offering, an institution as august as the Huddersfield Choral Society (HCS) could not allow the moment to pass without taking advantage of the opportunity to perform one of Wagner’s most impressive choral outbursts – “Wacht auf! Es nahet gen den Tag” (Awake! the dawn of day draws near) f

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.

On Friday, a new co-production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg opened at the Lyric. The only comedy among Wagner’s mature music dramas, its sound is very much like that of the better-known tragedies – brassy, overfull, with a core of strings teetering at vibrato’s edge.

The second collaboration between Opera Rara and the BBC Symphony Orchestra brought a starry cast to the Barbican Centre on Sunday evening for a revival of Donizetti’s tragic opera Belisario. Written in 1836, immediately after the triumph of Lucia di Lammermoor, it was an instant success following its première at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice and remained in the repertoire for several decades.

Three years ago, John Berry, ENO’s Artistic Director, invited acclaimed theatre director Rufus Norris to reinvent Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Unfortunately, it was not much of a success, and was panned by critics. This year, the production has returned to ENO, with some changes, albeit none that are particularly remarkable. ENO’s publicity machine has, this time round, gone on an advertising offensive.

With most of the original cast of English National Opera's critically acclaimed production returning to the Royal Albert Hall to perform Britten's Peter Grimes for the BBC Proms, this was a performance of which much of the audience had high expectations. For the most part, these were met and, on occasion, exceeded.

For a taut drama about the relationships between men thrown together in an enclosed space, it's hard to imagine a better setting than the claustrophobic environment of a warship in Nelson's navy.

Gounod's Roméo et Juliette isn't exactly a rarity, but it is no longer one of the stalwarts of the opera repertoire, a position which it certainly occupied during the Victorian era (there were 102 performances at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris in the first year of its life, followed by 291 performances at the Opéra-Comique in the next twenty).

En ouverture de leur saison et préfigurant la célébration des 250 ans de Mozart, le Classical Opera, offrait au Barbican un concert de l’inachevé. Un programme monumental et une interprétation fidèle, pour un rendu presque trop soigné.