Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | George Humphreys

Every July, Buxton’s charming opera house hosts an international festival of opera, literature and the arts. This year the festival opened with a strong familiar favourite, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin.

Netia Jones' new production taps into Britten's silvery underworld in a staging dominated by video wizardry which is hypnotically beautiful, but comes at a price.

Director Jo Davies' staging of Mozart’s dramma giocoso for Nederlandse Reisopera is a high-spirited  affair packed with humour, where the emphasis is decidedly more on giocoso than on the dramma.

Despite the beautiful sensitivity of La Nuova Musica, coupled with some truly sublime singing, the silliness of Cavalli’s opera is sometimes overplayed in this semi-staged production; less is, sometimes, more.

Clever staging and a high standard of acting does much to happily while away the three hours of this baroque opera in the second of ETO's Baroque extravaganza.

David Jones' First World War epic poem comes to musical life in Iain Bell's newly-commissioned opera. 

Miller eschews the oriental side of the tale, seeing The Mikado as a play on daft British eccentricity. 

Calixto Bieito  updates the Carmen to the final years of Franco’s dictatorship and in Joan Anton Rechi’s revival, the results are often gritty and fierce, if unlikely to do anything for the Spanish tourist trade.

Is Handel’s Semele an oratorio or an opera? Of course Handel himself called it an oratorio but some suggest it is the English-language opera that he never wrote. 

ENO's revival of Jonathan Miller's 2009 production is musically solid, but falls short of the dramatic intensity achieved in previous years.

Keri-Lynn Wilson produces an outstanding UK conducting debut in Richard Jones' faithful production of Puccini's Girl of the Golden West for ENO.

Last night’s opening of Christopher Alden’s allusive, conceptual Rigoletto for ENO, a co-production with Canadian Opera Company, was a notable event for London opera. Musically, ENO have been on top of their game this season and last night was no exception.

Music Theatre Wales’ production of Salvatore Sciarrino’s The Killing Flower begins in darkness. Michael McCarthy’s highly stylized production fits with the music, which is a fitting interpretation of extreme emotions: love that knows no control and no reason.

The culmination of the London Handel Festival is a much anticipated event, and tonight’s performance of Handel’s radiant composition L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato was no exception. With an array of eminent musicians performing to a packed St George’s, Hanover Square, the mood was celebratory and the performance had a glow and energy that suited Handel’s mercurial music.

The full name of Handel's opera is Giulio Cesare in Egitto: it depicts a historically loose version of Caesar's sojourn in Alexandria, during which Pompey is murdered, Ptolemy is killed in battle and Cleopatra is installed as Queen.

This charity concert (supporting the Cots for Tots appeal) filled St George’s Bristol with the sound of J.S. Bach’s Mass in B minor. There was passion in the performance of the St Michael’s orchestra and chorus, which was made up of a combination of doctors and volunteers.

Between them, Mozart and Bach wrote what is to my mind some of the happiest music in the repertoire, and the works performed in this concert by Northern Sinfonia and Chorus reminded us that great music doesn’t have to be solemn, or deliver a serious message – sometimes it’s about having as much fun as possible.

Probably no other work in the repertoire has such mystical status as Bach's Matthew Passion. Phrases like "The Greatest Work in the Western Canon", trip glibly off the tongue while failing to illuminate its greatness or acknowledge its strangeness. It is the sacred cow of sacred cows.

In Stefano Podas Neuinszenierung bleiben vor allem die Sopransoli in Erinnerung.