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When done as well as this, a "concert staging" is not oxymoronic, but a precise term for a valuable mode of presentation.

With a powerful but not world-beating team of soloists, Gardner and the LPO tackle Schoenberg's sprawling cantata with aplomb – except for one near-catastrophic misstep.

Louisa Muller returns to revive her 2019 production, preserving the ambiguity – did the Governess see these things or imagine them? 

Ullmann's one act opera, written in the concentration camp at Terezin, receives a powerful performance from the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Under director Annabelle Comyn’s modern setting, we have a moving, convincing Fidelio to resonate with our current age.  

An incandescent concert performance of Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage launches a new era for the London Philharmonic under principal conductor Edward Gardner.

Garsington Opera's new production of Rossini's comic masterpiece is a bawdy hoot, but humour aside it features an ensemble who provide first-class bel canto singing.

When the pandemic struck and theatres were locked down, OperaGlass Works' staging of The Turn of the Screw was an early casualty. Creative thinking turned the production into a film, with London's oldest music hall the set. 

Robert Murray is the standout performer in a night of waltzes and numbers from operetta.

Barry goes for out-weirding Carroll at a fast and furious pace. There's plenty of fun and it's beautifully staged – but is that enough?

Aurora Orchestra prove too muscular for accompanying voices in Wigmore Hall, but Stephenson's setting of Rimbaud's poetry is impressive.

London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir paint a terrifying picture of hell and damnation at the Royal Festival Hall.

A classy and charming adventure through Gilbert & Sullivan with the OAE and John Wilson .

ENO's Merry Widow is big, brash, and more than a touch juvenile – but it's the most fun one can have at the opera.

Berlioz was well served in a performance that rose to heights of inspiring dignity and devotional beauty.

With a semi-staged production, directed by Benjamin Davis, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra has also been bringing George Benjamin's opera to concert hall audiences.

In Siberian conditions more akin to The Winter's Tale, a revival of Robert Carsen's season setting of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream offered a warm glow at the Coliseum.

A compelling and energetic debut production from a new opera company in the raddled surroundings of Wilton's Music Hall.

Stuart Skelton’s visceral Peter Grimes is matched by a strong cast with thrilling playing and singing from the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Edward Gardner.

Under Sir Simon Rattle’s baton, Andrew Norman’s children’s opera struggles to find either terrene or otherworldly land.

On a golden afternoon on the Wormsley estate, not everything on stage necessarily glittered, but there’s plenty of spirit in Annilese Miskimmon's production to entertain.

Edward Gardner paid a memorable visit to lead the Seattle Symphony in a transformative account of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius.

Haydn's La canterina provides cheerful undemanding entertainment from Classical Opera. 

Edward Gardner conducts a solemn, emotionally-charged performance of Berlioz’s radical masterpiece at Gloucester Cathedral

Mozart's messy monster of an opera gets a brutalist tidy-up at Garsington, but the determinedly straightforward reading only makes this work's innate problems more obvious. 

The London Mozart Players and a talented company of singers presented a special chance to hear a rare, unfinished Mozart opera in an even rarer guise. 

Shorn of Katie Mitchell’s production and presented on the Barbican Hall’s stage with only the occasional prop, George Benjamin's modern masterpiece Written on Skin came across with even greater intensity.

First seen at the innovative, fearless Aix-en-Provence festival three summers ago, George Benjamin’s riveting, grisly Written on Skin has arrived in New York. 

Ailyn Bozok's minimlaist production of Delibes' Lakmé at Opera Holland Park contains much tender beauty and is carried by fine musical performances. 

The LSO, led by Edward Gardner, delivered a moving and profound performance of Haydn's Creation despite the acoustic challenges of St Paul's. 

As director of the film Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh seemed like a natural choice to turn his hand to The Pirates of Penzance at English National Opera. Sadly, this proved not to be the case. 

Sir Thomas Allen and Robert Murray give a compelling performance as the two soldiers in Britten's War Requiem. 

Players from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightment play Schubert's Octet in F major alongside Lieder from 1824 sung by Roderick Williams, Mary Bevan, Robert Murray and Rozanna Madylus, accompanied by Sholto Kynoch.

Vert-Vert, undoubtedly the only opera named after a dead parrot, is a very, very silly opera – more a series of comic sketches than an integrated work. But in Garsington's production, everything delights.

A triumphant Elijah as Edward Gardner conducts the Blackheath Halls Chorus and Orchestra, joined by Matthew Rose, Ailish Tynan, Robert Murray and Louise Winter and young singers from Trinity Laban.

Classical Opera, with some deft revisions to Süssmayr's recitatives and a superb team of soloists, bring us a Clemenza both powerful and poignant, finally doing justice to Mozart's underrated late opera, composed for the coronation of a Hapsburg king. 

Offenbach’s wrongfully neglected masterpiece has returned to us at last, thanks to the concerted efforts of Opera Rara, the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment and Sir Mark Elder; and, above all, because of the tireless, lifelong devotion of one man: Jean-Christophe Keck.

Celebrating the Wagner centenary in 1913, the Hallé Orchestra gave a concert performance in Manchester of Acts II and III from Wagner’s epic final masterpiece Parsifal.

British director Richard Jones is well known for his bold, modern and often controversial takes on operatic repertoire. So I was very curious to see what surprising ideas he would come up with in directing Britten’s rarely performed opera Gloriana, originally composed in honour of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.

Jonathan Miller and ENO’s iconic interpretation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado has returned to the London Coliseum this Christmas, to the delight of G&S fans across the capital, including myself.

Handel’s Jephtha is an oratorio, rather than an opera. However, the story is one of high drama and emotion, and thus the work lends itself easily to operatic adaptation.

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.

The first night of the Proms was, in this year of Olympic celebrations and the Diamond Jubilee, a tribute to all things English, featuring an impressive range of singers and a (somewhat appropriate) relay team of stellar English conductors. The programme began with a strange mixture of old and new.

The West End/Broadway musical is alive and well, raking in millions with its blend of light music, song and dance routines and not-too-taxing drama. But its spiritual ancestor, the operetta, is an unfashionable beast.

Of the various possible ways of conducting Wagner's Flying Dutchman, ENO's Edward Gardner took the direct approach. From the first tremolo string notes, the orchestra launched into the main leitmotif at full tilt, followed by the sound of stormy seas swirling more furiously than you've ever heard them, leaving the audience breathless.

Whatever your theological convictions, Christian or otherwise, it is doubtless that the collective elements that make up The Dream of Gerontius contribute to one of the greatest works of both English literature and the English Choral Tradition.

Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah, first performed at the Birmingham Town Hall in 1847, was enormously popular in Victorian England. In this sense, the Royal Albert Hall, the grandest of Victorian buildings, is spiritually an ideal venue for this great choral masterpiece.

Mozart's Don Giovanni is an opera that is most difficult to classify. On the one hand, it has many of the trappings of a traditional opera buffa: a fast-paced farce with people falling in and out of bed, master and servant switching clothes, a buffoon-like manservant sung in the bass register and so on.