Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Angelika Kirchschlager

Keith Warner directs a new opera which packs in betrayal, murder, oppression, freedom, love and the Spanish Inquisition into a mere 90 minutes.

Hats off to Andreas Homoki, Artistic Director at the Zurich Opera House, for staging a musical around “the chill of ghostly shadows”.

Vienna State Opera offered a solid production in which precious little gleamed.

Requiring trained opera singers to focus primarily on acting and asking actors to sing in a renowned opera house puts everyone out of their comfort zone, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

I have no objection per se with naked women bathing in blood, masturbating to crucifixes or being flagellated by priests in confessional booths, but only if it somehow aids understanding of the story

Every operatic ingredient was thrown into the pot for H.K. Gruber's Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald (Tales from the Vienna Woods), but do too many cooks spoil this operatic broth?

Vienna is a nostalgic town, and in few places is the past clung onto more tightly than at the State Opera, where a Tosca created for Renata Tebaldi has been pressed creakingly into service for over 55 years now.

At the end of a successful week in which the orchestra’s recording of The Apostles won BBC Music Magazine’s Disc of the Year award, Sir Mark Elder conducted the Hallé in a joyfully youthful account of Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, followed by graphic Janáček and Hadyn.The concert programme was interesting on several fronts.

Conductor H.K. Gruber’s visits to the BBC Philharmonic are guaranteed to be unmissable concerts of the season; with unquenchable enthusiasm and pride in the music he programmes, Gruber, (known affectionately to all as “Nali”), always assures a stirring performance.

It is not often you find Monteverdi and Stravinsky snuggled side-by-side on the same programme, but that was exactly what was packed into the latest instalment of The Bostridge Project: ‘Ancient and Modern’ series at the Wigmore Hall.

The Holland Festival boasts quite an impressive relationship with Britten and his works. Tonight’s chamber opera, The Rape of Lucretia was first performed at the festival in 1947 with Britten, Peter Pears and Kathleen Ferrier (for whom the opera was written) and the English Opera Group. Tonight’s performance with Oliver Knussen at the helm is another proud continuation of this tradition.

Keith Warner und das Theater an der Wien beweisen mit Elegie für junge Liebende ein weiteres Mal ihre hervorragende Zusammenarbeit.