Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Bertrand de Billy

All three operas in Puccini's triptych are strongly cast in this revival. 

And the new, Spring casting for David McVicar's new production of Tosca has an ace in the hole – Anna Netrebko – and she certainly did not disappoint. 

Laurent Pelly’s staging provided some of the most memorable moments in this performance of Cendrillon. 

The role of Luisa, some of the daintier coloratura aside, fits Sonya Yoncheva like a glove. 

This was meant to be Pretty Yende's night, but it was Armenian tenor Liparit Avetisyan who stole hearts as country bumpkin Nemorino. 

Has Health and Safety finally caught up with the Spanish Inquisition? A flameless auto-da-fé and some low-key individual performances meant this revival took time to hit its stride. 

A compelling staging of Gluck's 1779 opera in Paris. 

For anyone seeing Carmen for the first time, this Royal Opera revival will have been a more than satisfactory evening. Old hands hoping to see something extra will find it in Hymel's Don José and Car's Micaëla, but not elsewhere.

Les Chorégies d'Orange present a new production of Verdi's Il trovatore with mixed results.

Amid red carpets and canapés, the Lyric Opera’s 2013/14 season opened on Saturday night with a work that perfectly suited the storm gathering above as ball-gowned luminaries swept into the hall: Verdi’s Otello, that late masterpiece of mood and terraced intensities.

Goethe’s epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (“The Sorrows of Young Werther”) hit the 1774 zeitgeist not only because it brought back emotion to the rather sober Age of Enlightenment, but because the tragic title hero sports a multi-faceted character that lends itself to various interpretations and projections, therefore making it easy to feel sympathy or even partly identify wit

I once heard a lecture by Gérard Mortier, then head of the Paris Opera, contrasting the twin operatic traditions starting from Monteverdi's serious and affecting dramma per musica and the lavish court entertainments of Lully. A couple of centuries on, there's no need to ask the side of the fence on which Massenet's Cendrillon falls.

Never a city to shy away from seasonal programming, this Easter Vienna is offering productions of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, Gounod’s Faust, and Wagner’s Parsifal. The latter two, at the Staatsoper, are familiar, but audiences should run to see the Theater an der Wien’s enthralling revival of Poulenc’s relatively rarely-produced masterwork.

À l'Opéra Bastille, le retour de la mise en scène d'Andrei Serban produit un Otello mitigé, où l'étincelante Aleksandra Kurzak répond à un Roberto Alagna défaillant.

Fallait-il condamner la simplicité de l’intrigue à tant de simplisme esthétique ? Retour sur Un bal masqué où l’expressivité, les nuances et l’ambiguïté seront à rechercher chez les interprètes. 

Carmen dans la mise en scène de Calixto Bieto, présentée actuellement à l'Opéra Bastille, dépeint une héroïne victime du machisme et d'un certain ordre moral conservateur, tout en affirmant sa nécessité d'indépendance et la légimité de ses désirs de liberté.

Verdis Macbeth als Beitrag zum Hieronymus Bosch-Gedenkjahr: Schauriges zu schöner Musik, Inszenierung mit vielen Fragezeichen. 

Die Bayerische Staatsoper eröffnet mit einer etwas handzahmen Inszenierung vom Fromental Halévys La Juive die Opernfestspiele 2016.

Capriccio in einer klugen, herausfordernden Inszenierung und in hervorragender Besetzung - ein Ereignis.

Qu'on le veuille ou non, jouer le requiem de Mozart est devenu un acte politique. Instruments anciens ou instruments modernes ? Faut-il opter pour Süssmayr – un choix manifestement sûr – ou tenter, au risque de se faire huer des extrémistes, Robbins Landon, voire la version de Rio ? La réponse de Bertrand de Billy dans cet article.

Stehende Ovationen für hochklassige musikalische Leistungen in Dmitri Tcherniakovs Produktion.