Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Alasdair Elliott

Anthony Minghella's classic production of Madam Butterfly makes a welcome return with a sensational role debut by Natalya Romaniw as Cio-Cio-san.

An exquisitely matched pair of sopranos as Susanna and the Countess make up for some quirky casting elsewhere. 

Mezzo-soprano Rachel Kelly and soprano Susanna Hurrell were the eponymous pair and, my, how they chewed the scenery.

After nearly two decades away from the Covent Garden stage, it was time Britten's Billy Budd came home, in a new production from Madrid by Deborah Warner. 

Scottish Opera brings opera to the people on a huge scale in a promenade production of Pagliacci.  

Fiona Shaw's production doesn't always get everything right, but Lucy Crowe's debut as the Countess is the defining success of the this revival.

A decent cast was unable to redeem a fundamentally dull opera that lacks the psycholgical complexity and tension of both the original Graham novel and its famous Hitchcock adaptation.

Holten's masonic lodge setting of Meistersinger gets a lot right but is occasionally uneven; Terfel and Hughes Jones are constantly good to listen to.

Renée Fleming has decided the time is right to bow out gracefully from the operatic stage, choosing her signature role to bid the fondest of farewells to London.

I arrived at the Royal Opera House in the usual way, settled into my seat, and – could you believe it – the opera was gone!

1960s kitsch set in old Seville, excellent acting and movement direction combines with strong singing and immaculate playing from the OAE to make Glyndeboune's Le nozze di Figaro a triumph.

“Honour your masters!” Sachs instructs Walther in the final scene. Wagner's spirit was honoured well as Glyndebourne's festival opened, but did the song contest necessarily crown the right winner?  

“If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it.” There was certainly plenty of Shakespeare-inspired music on the bill for the London Philharmonic Orchestra's celebration of The Bard. 

Aidan Lang, head of Seattle Opera, reveals his talents as a stage director in a fresh and engaging interpretation of Mozart's comic masterpiece. 

Leah Hausman's revival of David McVicar's production allows the comedy to stem from the situations set up by Mozart and da Ponte... aided by Erwin Schrott's witty Figaro.

If “all the world’s a jest”, as Sir John Falstaff claims at the end of Verdi’s final operatic masterpiece, then we need players – and directors – with a sense of frivolity. Robert Carsen truly delivers. 

In 1984, I went to Covent Garden to see Andrei Serban's production of Turandot and was bewitched. Thirty years, fifteen revivals and a wealth of opera-going later, I was bewitched all over again by Nicola Luisotti's rendering of the score.

If Count Almaviva (to say nothing of Don Giovanni) were alive today, he might perhaps enlist Richard Dawkins to defend his behaviour. We know from evolutionary biology that the male stands the best chance of passing on his genes if he has many partners, the female if she can keep the male around to help raise the children he’s had with her.

The silence at the end of the concert said it all. To have plunged the attention of the entire Royal Albert Hall into utter silence for a whole minute after the music has finished was an impressive feat. Such was the audience response to Mark Padmore’s closing walk down the back of the stage, as Captain Vere.

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 Janáček's opera The Makropulos Case, the operagoer must accept a single premise of implausible fantasy: from then on, the action flows inexorably and logically to its conclusion. It's a device used by a great deal of fantasy literature, from the low-brow of The Day of the Triffids to the high-brow of Janáček's compatriot Kafka's Metamorphosis.