Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Bridget Kimak

Joining OHP's 2019 production of Wolf-Ferrari's charming domestic comedy, a blazing new production of Pagliacci delivers everything that one could want from Leoncavallo's infamous opera. 

Bergen National Opera’s new production allows the story to speak to itself, while strong performances from Eric Halfvarson and Elisabeth Teige gave the performance its edge.

In the first of its opera productions this season, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama presented an interesting combination of Stravinsky's odd little comedy, Mavra and Tchaikovsky's tale of the blind princess, Iolanta.

A welcome revival of a Russian rarity from the student forces of the Royal Academy of Music.

Weather forecasters would have a meteorological field day with Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Snow Maiden. Freezing temperatures have prevailed for sixteen years, and the immediate outlook in the Prologue is for further isolated snow showers, before a warm front eventually sweeps in from the south during Act IV. 

Over the years, I’ve generally found performances at Royal Academy Opera to be enjoyable and straightforward. This production of Cendrillon went rather beyond that.

Despite a relatively easy-to-follow storyline, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro is an opera that is hard to pull off entirely successfully. Musically, it requires enormous vigour from both cast and orchestra; dramatically, this opera buffa demands strong acting skills in order to eke out its moments of farce.

It had lain in the archives of the British Library since around 1986. Now, rediscovered by a PhD student and transcribed by Stephen Anthony-Brown, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s opera Thelma has at last received its world première in the capable hands of Surrey Opera.It’s a small miracle that Thelma, written between 1907 and 1909, came to be performed at all.