Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Anne-Marie Owens

Janáček’s satirical opera The Excursions of Mr Brouček may not be among his greatest dramatic works, yet it earns its place in the limelight for its musical, visual and dramatic wit at Grange Park Opera.

Natalya Romaniw is a natural as our maligned heroine: Paul Curran creates staging of bewildering comic complexity and pulls it off with panache.

Director Oliver Mears turns Scottish Opera’s Eugene Onegin into a memory play, with fine singing from a strong cast starring Natalya Romaniv as a thrilling Tatyana.  

Trophy room glass display cases and glassy-eyed stuffed animals are the setting for a distinctive take on Wagner's epic music drama. 

Grange Park Opera scored a direct hit with a fine production of Janáček's masterpiece, led by a superb performances from Natalya Romaniw and Susan Bullock as Jenůfa and the Kostelnička.

Two parts of Puccini's triptych are directed by Michael Barker-Craven - Il tabarro and Suor Angelica - in brilliantly successful productions at Leeds Grand Theatre.

Welsh National Opera may have reached the ripe old age of seventy but it's very much alive and kicking.

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.

Annilese Miskimmon sets Janáček's powerful tale in rural Ireland, bringing this blistering drama of a close-knit rural community closer to home.

Bringing Peter Grimes to Grange Park a year after the Britten centenary is an enormous challenge. With ‘Grimes on the Beach’ still fresh in the memory, the task of recreating the Suffolk coast in Hampshire’s idyllic countryside might have seemed a step too far. 

When you think chic, black-tie country house opera, you probably don’t also think sixteen barefoot nuns being executed. Grange Park Opera’s fusion of these two contrasting ideas, however, has a lot going for it: their production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites combines its minimal but effective staging with some impressive singing.

The scene in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin where the peasants, weary from gathering in the harvest, sing and dance for the woman who owns the estate (and, for that matter, owns them) is perhaps not the best example of gritty social realism in opera.

There’s usually plenty of hype surrounding a newly written opera performed at Covent Garden, but the carefully placed stories about Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune are on the improbable end of the scale, featuring a flying kebab shop and a team of breakdancers. So I arrived at Miss Fortune without any real idea of what I was going to get.

Baritone Thomas Hampson recently quipped that he'd try anything other than Gilbert and Sullivan, echoing the sentiments of many opera fans who are inclined to see the operettas penned by the Victorian duo as the preserve of amateur dramatic societies and school drama clubs. With this in mind, it was somewhat surprising to see Opera North create a new production of Ruddigore back in 2010.

The message in Paul Curran's new production of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride is a simple one: violent and powerful men are the same in every era. And, of course, no good can result from the violence. If the opera's title made you expect a happy and light-hearted occasion, think again: it's definitely not that sort of Royal Wedding.

Jonathan Miller's much-loved production of The Mikado for English National Opera is now 25 years old and well remembered. But not, I confess by me. My last experience of Gilbert and Sullivan was on the other side of the curtain, as a sister, cousin or aunt in a school production of HMS Pinafore, an experience sufficiently scarring that I resolved never to go to a G&S opera again.