Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Liam Steel

An opportunity to hear one of Respighi's operas in the UK is a real treat; the composer's take on Sleeping Beauty, La bella dormente nel bosco, is an ideal companion to to Ravel's  L'Enfant et les sortilèges in a terrific double bill at the Royal College of Music.

Timothy Edlin was a superb ass, first among six equals, in Liam Steel's production. 

A great return appearance for English Touring Opera's Puccini double bill opening its spring tour at the Hackney Empire.

A joyous explosion of tuneful Victorian satire provides an unlikely, yet ideal, contrast to English Touring Opera's Tosca as their Patience tours the UK in this finely-cast, period-perfect production.

A case of “seeing double” in Salzburg, as Cecilia Bartoli brings West Side Story to her Whitsun Festival. 

The laughs keep on coming in Liam Steel's glorious 1950s Albert Herring in an English village where pretensions rise as morals decay, while Nick Pritchard shines as our modest eponymous hero.

English Touring Opera's production of Mozart's The Magic Flute launches in Hackney, balanced more towards fun than profundity, with some stunning coups de théâtre.

Paul Bunyan is something of an oddity in Benjamin Britten’s oeuvre; a satirical operetta (with a libretto by W.H. Auden) about pioneers in America who are led by a gigantic lumberjack. 

If anyone tells you that all opera is highbrow, Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld provides you with a perfect example of the opposite. It's coarse, raunchy, fast, fun, and continually pokes fun at the conventions of grand opera.