Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Rachel Nicholls

Launching that most ambitious of endeavours, a Ring cycle, Grange Park Opera’s production of Das Rheingold proves a real achievement, led by the superb Alberich of David Stout.

This bracing performance of The Flying Dutchman is a powerful reminder of the extraordinary musical standards which are at risk in the face of WNO’s subsidy cuts. 

Why is Tchaikovsky’s very fine opera still a rarity outside Russia? David Pountney directs a new production at the Surrey festival. 

Margaret Atwood’s dystopic novel, masterfully adapted for the operatic stage, is strongly performed at ENO and rings even truer today than it did when it was written.

Charles Edwards' ambitious production is well served by a strong cast as Grange Park Opera opens its season in the Theatre in the Woods. 

An outstanding performance from Rachel Nicholls lights up Carmen Jakobi's compelling production of Korngold's exploration of grief.

Breastplates are back in vogue, but comedy horses and cheap production values undermine the first chapter in English National Opera's new Ring cycle. 

An incandescent concert performance of Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage launches a new era for the London Philharmonic under principal conductor Edward Gardner.

Opera North performed a semi-staged and shortened Fidelio with a committed group of soloists, chorus and orchestra led by Mark Wiggelsworth.  With a pared Orchestra, the opera came across as a hymn of hope.

What distinguishes Noseda's Tristan most of all is especial balance in the orchestra and a transparency of sound that reveals the inner-workings of the music.

A dramatic new work from Nicola LeFanu with soprano Rachel Nicholls and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov, together with a fine account of Schreker's Nachtstück.

At the basic level Tristan und Isolde is an opera of hormones, not happenings; fathoms deeper it explores human experience at a point where sense is dumb and flesh retires – as close to heaven and hell as it’s possible to go without first having to die.

Masaaki Suzuki leads Bach Collegium Japan in delicate renderings of the Orchestral Suite no.3, the Double Concerto and the Magnificat that convince more in the slower passages.

If Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, then Boris Godunov is about five Russian dolls' worth.

With ENO having been in the news for all the wrong reasons last week,  it needed Richard Jones' The Mastersingers of Nuremberg to be a great production. Lit up by a towering performance by Iain Paterson, it is.

Sir Mark Elder conducted the Hallé in an original and subtle programme to commemorate the First World War at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall.

The Presteigne Festival went Polish this year with an enterprising perspective of contemporary and post-war works including the world première of Paveł Łukaszewski’s newly commissioned Requiem. 

As a very generous birthday present for ‘Accrington’s Finest’, Harrison Birtwistle, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Martin Brabbins pulled out all the stops to give a revelatory performance of the composer’s most Wagnerian opera, Gawain.

In Harry Fehr’s much-anticipated new production of The Flying Dutchman for Scottish Opera, the setting is in Scotland – as Wagner had originally intended before a last-minute switch to Norway during rehearsals for the first production in 1843.

Those happy to brand the British Isles as the "land without music" for the time between Purcell and Britten might have cause to rethink if they audited the vintage of London of the late 1760s. Johann Christian Bach, the youngest of Johann Sebastian's sons, moved to England in 1765, helped along by the expatriated Carl Friedrich Abel, with whom he shared a house on Meard Street in Soho.

Pour la première de la saison lyrique romaine, Daniele Gatti amenait l’Orchestra e Coro del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma dans un Richard Wagner épuré.

Pour ce Tristan und Isolde proposé au Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Daniele Gatti dirige un Orchestre National de France très inspiré et un duo vocal en or, Torsten Kerl et Rachel Nicholls, étoiles d'une distribution équilibrée. Une production vraiment satisfaisante, dans une mise en scène soignée de Pierre Audi.