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

Almost 30 years since its last run, Gerald Barry’s The Intelligence Park makes a boisterous return to the stage. 

Comic opera can fall flat, but if The Grange Festival's new production of Verdi's final masterpiece is a total delight, with a strong concept and a strong cast. This is country-house opera at its best.

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.

It's hard to find anything not to admire in a thrillingly strong production of Britten's haunting chamber opera. 

Fiona Shaw's production doesn't always get everything right, but Lucy Crowe's debut as the Countess is the defining success of the this revival.

Elena Langer's gorgeous and tongue-in-cheek Figaro Gets a Divorce shines in Geneva, despite David Pountney's boxy libretto. 

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

In Ron Daniels' production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at Santa Fe Opera, the specter of death and the possibility of judgment is always center stage. 

Elena Langer and David Pountney's new WNO opera Figaro Gets a Divorce did not disappoint. Langer's new refreshing score had flair and imagination in a memorable performance.

Lothar Koenigs conducted a musically excellent and dramatically straightforward performance of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro in Cardiff.

Despite some fine singing, Benedict Andrew's production of La bohème for English National Opera is devoid of heart. 

Calixto Bieito  updates the Carmen to the final years of Franco’s dictatorship and in Joan Anton Rechi’s revival, the results are often gritty and fierce, if unlikely to do anything for the Spanish tourist trade.

A new co-commissioned production from English National Opera and the Barbican sees Tansy Davies tackle the most harrrowing of modern subjects: 9/11.

With its latest incarnation of Die Zauberflöte, the Royal Opera ticks all the boxes in a strongly cast revival. 

In the revival of David Alden's Peter Grimes at English National Opera, the singing is excellent, the orchestral performance is out of the top drawer and the staging hardly puts a foot wrong.

This autumn is Strauss and Freud season in London: while the Royal Opera are showing Charles Edwards’s searingly Freudian take on Richard Strauss’s Elektra, ENO have opted for the polar opposite mood with Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus: Christopher Alden’s production is just as Viennese, just as laden with dreams and sexuality, but filled to the brim with gags and frivolous decadence.

When going to see a new production at ENO, always expect the unexpected. In ENO’s recent history, that has certainly been true, though not always to its credit. Friday’s opening performance of Charpentier’s Medea was no exception to the rule; however, in this case, it was an opulent, stylish and fabulous (in more than one sense) production, complemented by a truly spectacular cast.

Carmen has always been in my head as a “pretty” opera: lovely tunes, colourful setting, exotically alluring gypsy brushing up against hunky bullfighter and handsome soldier - not exactly French Grand Opera, perhaps, but a far cry from gritty verismo.

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.