Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Alek Shrader

Lots of people talk about keeping opera relevant. WNO shows why this opera always has been.

James Darrah stages Handel's sensual oratorio for Festival O, a feast of wonderful singing. 

Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Kevin Newbury see Candide as a coming-of-age story, placing it in their own high-school years, specifically 1992, making Westphalia a USA knockoff.

David Alden's staging of Alcina mines the rich theatricality of one of Handel's best-loved operas with enchanting but also perplexing results. 

Alek Shrader's Wigmore Hall debut was thrilling, touching, charming and mysterious.

This performance marked Sir Mark Elder’s debut with the company and, beginning with the overture, he offered his individual interpretation of the score. He had an enormous range of dynamics and his tempi varied widely with the emotional values of each scene.

Alek Shrader was in control of his high cs and managed to play comedy while sending out glorious wafting notes of emotion and musicality.  

Alek Shrader, Judith Forst, and Tracy Dahl dazzle and amuse in Vancouver Symphony's presentation of Bernstein's operetta. 

Handel's sensual tragicomedy comes to dazzling life in Seattle Opera's first-ever staging of Semele, a new production directed by Tomer Zvulun.

Only the slightest of quibbles with a fun, frothy new production of The Merry Widow at The Met. 

Director Christopher Alden's charming Partenope slinks its Surrealist way into San Francisco.

The new Barber of Seville at the Lyric Opera, brought to life by the director Rob Ashford, set designer Scott Pask, and conductor Michele Mariotti, is not only intelligent and imaginative but also strings successions of images, gestures, and sung moments into truly satisfying large-scale forms.

The final production of the San Francisco Opera’s fall season was a new staging of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, advertised everywhere as The Barber of Seville.

It’s pretty luxurious to be able to stumble out of your front door at ten to six, wander five minutes round the corner to your friendly local cinema, be greeted with a glass of sparkling wine, and then watch a high-definition live screening of a top contemporary opera production at the Met.

Read our review of Robert Lepage's production of The Tempest in its 2012 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.

In keeping with its summer season of novelties, San Francisco Opera have produced a new English-language production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. Advertisements for the production showed baritone Nathan Gunn in a green, full-body leotard as a sort of frogman of a Papageno, leaping in the air and wearing a manic expression.

After the success of Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia, Britten and director/librettist Eric Crozier discussed future operatic projects. The composer wanted his next opera to be a comedy and insisted that it be set in England. When Crozier suggested adapting Guy de Maupassant’s La Rosier de Madame Husson, Britten knew he was on to something good. Indeed, it was an ideal choice.