Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Wendy Bryn Harmer

The Metropolitan Opera makes good on its promise to present more contemporary work, opening the season with Jake Heggie's gut wrenching tale of rage and redemption. 

Alessandro Talevi production for Festival O has sight gags and vaudeville tricks aplenty and features splendid voices in a fine cast. 

The musical experience was dominated by the imagery making spectators feel, at least at times, overwhelmed.

Christopher Alden's risk-taking, Expressionist-tinged production of the early Wagner breakthrough is provocative in all the right ways.

Wagner famously idealized the concept of the “Gesamtkunstwerk”, a total work of art that incorporates many artistic media into a single piece. He would have appreciated Seattle Opera’s production of Götterdämmerung.

Some Ring cycles are based on ideological concepts; Seattle Opera’s current Ring cycle is based on a place. That place is the Pacific Northwest of the United States, home to such extraordinary natural beauty that stage director Stephen Wadsworth has deemed it fit for the gods.

The word Götterdämmerung contextually translated becomes “twilight of the gods”, and Thursday night’s story at the Met was indeed full of endings: the conclusion of the saga of the ring and the end of several lives, human and god alike.

Quite simply, it’s the largest scale event in all of opera. With 18 hours of music in a 3,800 seat house, Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Met is a giant, lavish undertaking – all starting with that famous E flat chord: starting from the quietest of pianissimo double bass notes and building for nearly four minutes before it explodes into the melody of the Rhinemaidens.

Read our review of Robert Lepage's production of Wagner's Götterdämmerung in its 2012 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.

Read our review of Robert Lepage's production of Wagner's Die Walküre in its 2011 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.

Read our review of Robert Lepage's production of Das Rheingold by Wagner, in its 2010 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.