Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Leigh Melrose

Opera Australia delivers a sensational new Elena Kats-Chernin opera about the immensely gifted and troubled Australian painter, Brett Whiteley.

In Emma Dante's staging we are viewing an allegory of death as painted in the medieval frescoes of Italian cemeteries.

Ligeti's “anti-anti opera” opens in Zurich in a new production by Tatjana Gürbaca. 

Never before has human impotence been so cruelly portrayed on stage.

Ivor Bolton and David McVicar have teamed up to create an unapologetically Brittenian Gloriana, with Anna Caterina Antonacci at the top of a great cast

A powerful and emotional staging by Bieito with five-star performances from both leads.  

An operatic take on The Winter's Tale – categorised as one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’ – premieres at English National Opera. 

Louis Andriessen’s new opera is a masterly expedition into the grand and grotesque mind of Athanasius Kircher, polymath and fantastist, but it is hampered by a clumsy libretto.

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.

Keri-Lynn Wilson produces an outstanding UK conducting debut in Richard Jones' faithful production of Puccini's Girl of the Golden West for ENO.

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 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.

Military service brutalises. If you’re in any doubt about this, Berg’s short opera Wozzeck should dispel them, and particularly so in Carrie Cracknell’s new production for ENO.

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.

With most of the original cast of English National Opera's critically acclaimed production returning to the Royal Albert Hall to perform Britten's Peter Grimes for the BBC Proms, this was a performance of which much of the audience had high expectations. For the most part, these were met and, on occasion, exceeded.

When choosing a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta to be performed at the Proms in a year firmly branded as "London 2012", The Yeomen of the Guard had obvious appeal, being set in one of the capital's most famous landmarks, and giving the opportunity, even in semi-staged form, to deck the hall with Beefeater uniforms.

The glittering white of a luxury cruise liner above, the darkened hell of the concentration camp below. Johan Engels' set for Weinberg's The Passenger, first seen at the Bregenz festival in 2010 and now at the ENO in London, is one of the most striking and effective opera sets I've ever seen, both framing the action and adding colour.

This was a recreation of a Proms concert that Benjamin Britten conducted in 1963, but with a contemporary twist.

Last night saw the UK première of Alexander Raskatov's new opera A Dog's Heart, performed by ENO together with theatre company Complicite. The opera, based on a 1925 novella by Russian satirist Mikhail Bulgakov, tells the tale of Sharik, a stray dog who is given the testicles and pituitary gland of a human by an eminent surgeon, the Professor.

Die Welturaufführung ist weder konfrontativ noch bringt sie neue Einsichten: überdrüber und doch irgendwie daneben.

Calixto Bieito, fiel a su estilo y tradición, se entrega a mostrar la caída en desgracia de la protagonista de Die Soldaten del modo más directo y descarnado posible.

On ne pourra pas dire que l’équipe des metteurs en scène/chorégraphes Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui et Damien Jalet, associée à Marina Abramovic qui signait et le décor et le concept, aient fait dans le conventionnel, offrant une approche à la fois futuriste et rétro de Pelléas et Mélisande.