Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Amanda Forsythe

Once again, the BEMF brings a Baroque opera back to life. Reinhard Keiser’s 1705 Octavia is exceptionally well sung, adroitly staged, designed and danced, with impeccable musicianship.

An outstanding role debut from Davidsen, a star-studded vocal cast and a revelatory orchestral performance make a Beethoven anniversary performance to savour.

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

A riotous double bill of Pergolesi at the Boston Early Music Festival.

With Lully’s death in 1687 and Louis XIV’s increasing immersion in religious piety under the influence of Madame de Maintenon, the court ceased to exercise a strangle hold on opera.

Nicholas Kraemer led the Chicago Symphony in a spirited program of Handel that included some rarely heard vocal works with the chorus and soprano Amanda Forsythe.

Released from the incarceration of directorial prison walls, Fidelio can still make a most powerful impact on the concert platform.

Weber, Henze and Mendelssohn cast a fairy spell over Symphony Hall. 

Juan Diego Flórez turns in a tour de force in the title role of a consistently attractive and inventive performance of Gluck's ballet-laden Orphée et Eurydice.

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

Rounding off the holiday weekend almost like an after-dinner cordial, the Boston Early Music Festival presented a pair of Pergolesi intermezzi: La serva padrona and Livietta e Tracollo.

In the end, the big man gets the last laugh. Come to think of it, he also gets the first laugh, but for different reasons: you sense that Verdi steadily grew to love Falstaff in the course of writing the opera, as he turns from a coarse buffoon into a maligned old man and, eventually, into the spirit of laughter itself.

In 2008, conductor Thomas Hengelbrock rediscovered Niobe, Regina di Tebe, written in 1687 by the Venetian-born, German-based composer Agostino Steffani. Although now little remembered, Steffani was a world-famous composer in his day and a man of many talents who became a diplomat and bishop as well as being a musician.