Live, On demand, Streamed event: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Roland Wood

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla approached the Eighth with a clear vision of the music’s structure and a plan to free the life that teems beneath its mighty vaults.

Musically, WNO gets it right. Straightforward brilliance is the order of the day, and plenty of it.

Even given a routine revival, McVicar's staging has much to recommend it, returning the opera to its literary roots. 

Grange Park Opera’s enjoyable new production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera looks a little homespun on stage, but has plenty of musical compensations.

Christopher Alden’s production of Verdi’s Rigoletto returned to Toronto tighter, more focussed and with fewer dramatic incongruities. Add to this that every aspect of the music making was top notch and it made for a fine evening at the theatre.

Woefully stiff acting lets down an otherwise excellent production; Joseph Calleja impresses in his role début as Cavaradossi.

Sir David McVicar’s new production of Pelléas et Mélisande for Scottish Opera is stylish and lit like a painting. 

A spirited performance of Verdi's beloved work highlighted the virtues of opera in concert.

Justina Gringyte is a fabulous Carmen in Scottish Opera's dark take on this most tuneful of operas. Large choruses, including children with cigarettes, and a strong supporting cast make this an enjoyable show.

If “all the world’s a jest”, as Sir John Falstaff claims at the end of Verdi’s final operatic masterpiece, then we need players – and directors – with a sense of frivolity. Robert Carsen truly delivers. 

Scottish Opera's Il trovatore has a uniformly strong cast and shorus who sing finely, conducted by Tobias Ringwood producing spectacular sounds from the orchestra.  A wonderful end to the season. 

Opera North's La Traviata at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, makes an excellent start to Opera North's new season.

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Philharmonia in a fine account of Mahler's mighty “Symphony of a Thousand”, culminating in a dramatic realisation of Faust's redemption.

Julian Anderson’s Thebans, a bold attempt at condensing Sophocles’ three Theban plays into a single opera. The result is a powerful piece of theatre which drags the audience into the story of Oedipus’s horrific downfall and death, with its ensuing civil war.

The Canadian Opera Company’s update of A Masked Ball to the 1960s, Kennedy-era Boston, while problematic, is actually based on Verdi’s experience of staging his first production a hundred years earlier. Verdi’s score flows right into the heart, and Adrianne Pieczonka is irresistible.

Before the beginning of this new version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute from Simon McBurney, Complicite and English National Opera, one may wonder, looking at the stage, why it was recently hailed as the company’s most technically advanced creation to date: an austere, no-frills set consisting of a single suspended rectangular slab and a raised orchestra pit both reflect this production’s refreshing

In one of several (pretty outrageous) notes to conductors in the score of his Roméo et Juliette, Berlioz states that “the average listener has no imagination” and, as a result of this, the sixth movement of the work should be cut in 99 per cent of performances.

In his production of Fidelio for English National Opera, director Calixto Bieito sets out to completely contradict the work’s central tenet.

The world of opera can sometimes be hard for the newcomer to love as there are often fiendishly complicated and frequently unbelievable plots to get to grips with. Jules Massenet’s opera Werther is happily none of these: it is a straightforward story of unrequited love.

Professional performances of English operas are rare – they always have been – and it is presumably the 60th anniversary of The Pilgrim’s Progress specifically that has prompted this 2012 revival. It seems that without a significant anniversary to justify blowing the dust off a score, English operas tend to lie unheeded – the exception of course is Benjamin Britten.

The house was full for the opening night at the London Coliseum, and there were plenty of whoops for conductor Nicholas Collon as he made his ENO debut. This year marks the 25th anniversary of ENO's celebrated production of Mozart's The Magic Flute, and this revival – the fourteenth – will be the last.

What’s the connection between Harry Potter and Mozart? Fiona Shaw is perhaps best known these days as the boy wizard’s Aunt Petunia – or our greatest classical actress for those with longer memories.

Verdi's Simon Boccanegra explores how the characters of powerful men change (or don't) with age and fortune: the action happens over several decades, and the character of Simon gives wonderful scope for some serious character acting.

Intermezzo is an opera based on the real life happenings in the relationship between Richard Strauss and his wife Pauline, characterised on stage as Robert and Christine Storch. Maestro Robert takes on a long conducting stint in Vienna, leaving Christine in her country house with their eight year old son Franzl, and a retinue of staff.

Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica's libretto for La Bohème has to rank as one of the greatest libretti in opera. It's fast-paced, taut and witty throughout, expansively romantic at times. Most importantly, the wonder of La Bohème is the way it paints human relationships with the pin-point accuracy of a Dutch master or a Victorian miniaturist.