Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Kevin Burdette

Yuval Sharon's La bohème for Opera Philadelphia proves a mix of great singing and disorienting navigation. 

Davide Livermore's production of La bohème is inspired by the Impressionist troves at The Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Barnes Collection.

Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking is credited as being the most performed 21st-century opera, and with good reason.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's superb semi-staged production of Tosca. 

Adès opera resists explanation, and the ambiguity of the story drives much of its compelling nature. 

Santa Fe Opera's colorful and beautifully sung The Golden Cockerel makes a case for more Rimsky-Korsakov opera in the repertoire.

Robert Longbottom's take on Donizetti's Daughter of the Regiment captures the spirit of bel canto in Washington DC. 

A new bel canto opera, a pro football team, and the future of American Opera--all in a day's work for Heggie, McNally, DiDonato, and von Stade.

There was a nod to John Adams in the score, but also a kind of edgy Americana, complete with powerful writing for male chorus, and an attempt to communicate the flavor of rural North Carolina, not far from where Higdon grew up.

Alek Shrader was in control of his high cs and managed to play comedy while sending out glorious wafting notes of emotion and musicality.  

Two mountain-themed operas were performed recently in Dallas, including the much-anticipated world première of Joby Talbot's Everest. 

Visually and vocally beautiful, but the case for updating the setting of this story is not made.

Henri Bergson famously defined comedy as “something mechanical encrusted on the living”. One suspects that Jacques Offenbach would have been a fan of this definition, and that Christopher Alden most certainly is.

Chicks dig the high notes. The enduring popularity of Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment seems to indicate as much. The plot is silly (even by opera’s standards) and much of the music is not as memorable as some of Donizetti’s more popular works.

Those closing bars of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, tottering away into nothingness, is one of the great nexus points in musical history.

It’s pretty luxurious to be able to stumble out of your front door at ten to six, wander five minutes round the corner to your friendly local cinema, be greeted with a glass of sparkling wine, and then watch a high-definition live screening of a top contemporary opera production at the Met.

The plight of women trapped in plural marriage—one husband with multiple wives—glowed like a firebrand on the Perelman Theater stage on Sunday. Opera Company of Philadelphia’s Dark Sisters, in co-production with Gotham Chamber Opera and the Music-Theatre Group, is OCP’s final offering of the 2011-12 season.

The barely legal lives of women in polygamous marriages may seem like fertile ground for an opera. Dark Sisters, composed by Nico Muhly with a libretto by Stephen Karam, has many attractive moments in music and story, yet demonstrates the difficulties of drawing art from life.