Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Paul Nilon

Upcycled and recycled, a green production of Verdi's final opera is directed by Olivia Fuchs. 

Opera North's child-friendly production of The Cunning Little Vixen, conducted by Andrew Gourlay, is loaded with charm.

Some exceptional singing intermittently enlivens Daniel Slater's production which, dramatically and emotionally, takes time to ignite.   

Graham Vick's new staging of Mozart's unfinished Singspiel marks a welcome, exciting reopening of Teatro Costanzi after the Covid-19 shutdown.

At a time when the “relevance” is bandied around all too frequently in relation to opera, Martinů's really does deserve that tag. 

Geraint Bowen directs the Three Choirs Festival Chorus and Philharmonic Orchestra at Hereford Cathedral in two works once unfairly dismissed.

Stephen Medcalf directs a coherent staging of Mozart’s opera seria in which Idomeneo’s inner demons are to be battled. 

Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria tells one of the world’s great stories. This production is a treat for early opera fans and a great introduction for those new to the genre.

Handel's psychotic Tartar leader and bedhopping nobles are well served in an excellent collaboration between the Buxton Festival and the English Concert with some outstanding singing from Marie Lys and Owen Willetts.

A report from the 2015 Three Choirs Festival, held this year in the cathedral city of Hereford. 

Britten’s final opera given an impressively atmospheric staging, ideally conceived for the small venue

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

This new production of Mozart’s final, and often overlooked, opera from John Fulljames and Opera North is neither a period piece nor a straightforward translation into our own time. Instead, it inhabits it own dark and austere world created by set designer Conor Murphy and Finn Ross, whose stylish abstract projections incorporate elements of government buildings both ancient and modern.

The strange yet compelling story of the 350-year-old opera singer Elina Makropulos was Opera North’s showcase in a production première at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. Leoš Janáček wrote The Makropulos Affair, his penultimate opera, based on the Karel Čapek play about Elina Makropulos, who was given a potion to preserve her youth when she was sixteen.

For its centenary concert – given on 11th September 2011, in Cheltenham, and at Poole Lighthouse on Tuesday 13th September – Bournemouth Symphony Chorus paid tribute to those who fell victim to the catastrophic act of terrorism that shook the world ten years before.

The operas of Mieczyslaw Weinberg are being pulled out of obscurity. Until the 2010 Bregenz Festival, when director David Pountney placed the composer at the centre of the three-day event and staged an ambitious production of the The Passenger, none of his seven operas had ever been heard outside of Russia.

For the third of their major operas this season, the English National Opera chose Mozart's Idomeneo, one of Mozart's earlier masterpieces telling the story of the Cretan King Idomeneus's homecoming after the Trojan War.