Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Daniel Brenna

Although Bard's production is only intermittently successful, the chance to hear this Korngold rarity live should be savored.

The world is gloriously redeemed in the gripping final installment of San Francisco Opera's Ring cycle.

Both the technical effects and the singing impress in San Francisco Opera's dark Siegfried.

The final instalment of the Hong Kong Philharmonic's Ring cycle merits the orchestra joining the international big league. 

Hagen, the first chapter in the Theater an der Wien's reimagining of The Ring, features music from Das Rhinegold and Götterdämmerung woven seamlessly together, telling the story from the perspective of Hagen, son of Nibelung dwarf, Alberich.

Tatjana Gürbaca’s whole scale tampering with Wagner’s Siegfried had so many flashbacks and flashforwards there should have been a warning for photosensitive members of the audience.  

Olivier Tambosi’s controversial production of Janáček's Jenůfa first appeared at the Met in 2003.

Tonight’s Götterdämmerung brought the cycle to a fitting – and wholly American – conclusion. 

Zambello's Ring for the WNO continues to engage and impress. 

In addition to incorporating twelve-tone rows for each character and within larger musical units like canons and chorales, the entirety of the opera itself is palindromic in structure, with performers whose characters died gruesome deaths during the first act returning as new characters in the third.

The child-woman Lulu is a reflective receptacle for desire in Dutch National Opera’s extraordinary filmic production.

Tonight's setting of Die Soldaten in a WWI stable is so sordid you can almost feel the rats gnawing. Alvis Hermanis was right to warn in a newspaper interview that we would leave the theatre feeling shocked.

The Bayerische Staatsoper presents an ugly, brutal staging of Zimmermann's Die Soldaten – which is exactly as it should be. Barbara Hannigan's Marie steals the show, but the entire cast manage seemingly impossible musical and dramatic feats.

Dortmund Opera's daring new production of Tannhäuser is deeply stimulating and innovative, backed up by fine singing and orchestral playing.

Presenting Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in a single evening is audacious enough. To put on a Ring cycle in a week-end, you have to follow this by doing the same with Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, which requires something even more radical. Opéra de Dijon’s director Laurent Joyeux and dramaturg Stephen Sazio set themselves the task of cutting eight hours of music down to five.

Putting on a Ring cycle is normally considered a major undertaking for any opera company. For a mid-sized provincial opera company, the idea of staging the whole cycle in a weekend seems barely short of insane. But that’s what Opéra de Dijon are doing – Das Rheingold and Die Walküre last night, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung tonight, and it just had to be seen.

The German thinker Theodor Adorno once wrote that a musical setting of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, considered in its own literary right a masterpiece, may well have proved redundant.

Im Siegfried geht der Ring als Scherzo weiter und trägt dem mit ironischen Bildern Rechnung.