Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Alan Opie

The latest revival of Jonathan Miller's The Barber of Seville has everything you could want; strong direction, a strong orchestral performance, and a cast that's universally strong. No close shaves there!

WNO's excellent revival of John Copley's 2011 staging of Die Fledermaus is a delight. 

The Metropolitan Opera's new produdtion of Rusalka fails to explore a deeper complexity of the fairy tale, although a strong ensemble of singers and the superb Met Orchestra make it a musically compelling performance.

It would be no exaggeration to say Franz Hawlata stole the show, an act of grand larceny made all the more remarkable by the strong cast which shared the stage.

The Met's brought back its Die Fledermaus set in the turn-of-the-century Vienna in a glittering production with a winning ensemble of singers.

Toby Spence and Sarah Connolly make splendid soulful companions and conductor Peter Oundjian brings a resonant depth to Elgar's period-piece in a fine end to the RSNO's season.

David Robertson carried the Met Orchestra through one of the most brilliantly-conducted performances I’ve witnessed, though the music itself was not always impressive. 

Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas deserves credit for this excellent semi-staged version of Britten's Peter Grimes performed with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall.

Die Fledermaus is as quintessentially Viennese as zithers and Schnitzel. In John Wilson, the Philharmonia and a fine ensemble cast, we should have had all the ingredients for a memorable matinée performance, but a few elements meant the fizz went rather flat.

Peter Grimes may deserve the place it has gained in the operatic canon, but it’s not a work without problems.

35 years and many revivals after it was first seen, the late Joachim Herz’s version of Madam Butterfly (“Madama” spelt without the “a” here) is still going. For WNO’s themed series of “Free Spirits”, Caroline Chaney took on the revival director’s mantle. The result was a reliable production lacking in originality but not in warmth.

November continues to be a month of poppy art, despite Philip Larkin’s derisory account of “Wreath-rubbish in Whitehall”. As the only flower to survive the ravished soils of the trenches following the First World War, the poppy is replicated in the form of a paper badge to be worn yearly in commemoration of 11 November, the Armistice Day of 1918.

After their Mascagni debut last year, with L’amico Fritz (the composer’s first post-Cavalleria opera), Opera Holland Park have set out to uncover more music from the so-called ‘one-hit-wonder’ – still known to most for his smash verismo opera alone.

The nationality of Gaetano Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment is as confused as that of its eponymous heroine. Written by a homesick Italian expatriate for that most Parisian of venues the Opéra-Comique, it both continued Donizetti's Italian colonisation of the Paris opera scene (much bemoaned by Berlioz) and showed him adapting his style to the conventions of French theatre.

Hijacking, murder and terror on the high seas: you might expect that The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams's 1991 opera about the Palestinian hijacking of the cruise liner Achille Lauro has all the makings of a pot-boiling thriller. But you would be wrong: Adams and his librettist Alice Goodman have other fish to fry.