Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Nicholas Merryweather

Bampton’s “mission to rescue unjustly neglected classical period opera” is vindicated once again with a fresh, fun account of the near-lost original source for Rossini's La Cenerentola: Isouard's Cendrillon. 

A period-perfect Albert Herring from Francis Matthews for Buxton International Festival takes time to settle into its stride, but provides plenty of laughs along the way. 

L’Ospedale sounds like it should be a newly written opera about the NHS, but actually, it's a 350 year old piece. It makes for an hour's delectable light operatic entertainment.

This small, fun, fast-paced comedy, probably the UK première of Salieri's neglected fairytale, makes for a glorious garden opera evening at Bampton (and touring). 

Thomas Zehetmair brings out all the ochestral detail of Bach's masterpiece, creating a beautifully approachable and engaging St Matthew Passion that goes straight to the heart of the story.

Agrippina was a force to be reckoned with: the granddaughter, sister, niece, wife and mother of four Roman Emperors (and lover, incestuously, of at least two). As Mary Beard points out in her brilliant programme introduction, “Agrippina was probably the best connected woman that the Roman world ever saw” – and one of the most ruthless.

When the Baroque movement in art ended, the backlash was severe. The very adjective became an insult: the cold, clear, rarefied eye of 18th-century Neoclassicism found its opulence stifling, its luxury oppressive, and its profusion of ornament, ugly.

With its small raised platform and steeply seated audience, the Linbury Studio Theatre was an auspicious venue for the English Touring Opera’s production of Peter Maxwell Davies’ chamber opera The Lighthouse (1979). The trelliswork of metal bars encircling the stalls and the bleak lighting effects gave this performance a befittingly industrial air.

Purcell’s The Fairy Queen is a tricky thing to stage. It’s not an opera, with its own story-line, but a masque, a series of musical interludes intended to slot into a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One solution could be just to perform it in concert, but the music is so dramatic that it lends itself wonderfully to stage action.

S’attaquer à Rossini implique de comprendre son alchimie – en somme, de se souvenir qu’il ne peut exister sans qu’on mobilise la légéreté et la tenue, le souffle et la précision.