Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Giselle Allen

The director Edward Dick and his designer, Tom Scutt, alternate between realistic and expressionistic images in their creation of grim spectacle.

A highly satisfying level of polish in La Monnaie's stream in which one recognizes a precisely executed live performance at its core – one that would be thrilling to experience in person. 

Opera North brings Kurt Weill's “Broadway opera” Street Scene to the Leeds Grand Theatre in a thrilling production directed by Matthew Eberhardt and conducted by James Holmes.

Edward Dick directs a Tosca full of contemporary references with Opera North at Leeds Grand Theatre, Puccini's score conducted by Antony Hermus.

Two thematically linked, but contrasting short operas are the final component of Opera North's Little Greats season at the Leeds Grand Theatre.

Opera North's Little Greats festival continues with two deeply contrasting short operas - a grimly tragic and austere version of Macagni's Cavalleria rusticana and a frothy and hilarious production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Trial by Jury.

This Peter Grimes was a tale of two talents: the conductor and the star.

Giselle Allen and David Kempster are on good form in a performance of highlights from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, conducted by Jac van Steen.

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.

Crowning this cycle came a truly magnificent performance of Götterdämmerung, centred very much on Richard Farnes and his orchestra.

In Anna Russell's wittily deadpan analysis of Wagner's Ring cycle, she describes Wotan as “the head god” – pausing for dramatic effect before adding “and he's a crashing bore too.”

Opera North's cycle offers a form of personal Wagner therapy: all four music dramas in concert performances, but with carefully choreographed video and lighting effects. 

David Alden’s muddled clichés failed to convince all the time, but Edward Gardner steered us through a thrilling musical account of Tchaikovsky’s terrific opera.

Zurich's The Turn of the Screw is a masterful staging of the Benjamin Britten's musical narrative of Henry James' ghost story. 

A very welcome and triumphant revival of Peter Grimes begins Opera North’s Festival of Britten season, soon to be followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Death in Venice. The work has often been described as Britten’s greatest, the paeans of praise beginning soon after its first performance just after the Second World War, often involving the word “enigma”.

Sir Mark Elder conducted the Hallé in an unusual programme of music themed around hunting. There were many excellent performances, most memorably in Britten's Our Hunting Fathers, which added substantial depth to the evening.Assistant conductor Jamie Phillips began proceedings with a solid account of Haydn’s Symphony no. 73, “La Chasse”.

Henry James’ chilling 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw is a curious story and might be considered a gift to any composer as the basis of an extraordinarily sinister opera libretto.

The glittering white of a luxury cruise liner above, the darkened hell of the concentration camp below. Johan Engels' set for Weinberg's The Passenger, first seen at the Bregenz festival in 2010 and now at the ENO in London, is one of the most striking and effective opera sets I've ever seen, both framing the action and adding colour.

The first lesson I learnt from this evening’s stunning performance by Opera North of Das Rheingold to a completely full Hall One at the Sage is that however much you listen to Wagner's opera, absolutely nothing can prepare you for the physical and emotional impact of seeing a live performance, with the sheer power of the orchestra and the dramatic force of the music.

In the run up to their widely anticipated concert staging of Wagner's Das Rheingold this summer, Opera North are providing us with a number of events at their Howard Assembly Room which aim to explore different aspects of the Ring Cycle.