Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Paul Carey Jones

Amid the rough winds of late May, Julia Burbach directs Opera Holland Park's first venture into Wagner – The Flying Dutchman. 

Who wouldn't relish the chance of seeing a Ring cycle at close quarters? Longborough's Die Walküre isn't perfect, but it consistently delivers on the story and on character interpretation.

Using Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick's distillations of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, the company concluded its miniature Ring cycle in under five hours, without sacrificing musical or dramatic tension.

Puccini's Giselle-inspired opera is given a superb staging by Martin Lloyd-Evans to deliver Opera Holland Park's banger of the season. 

 Longborough Festival Opera’s ongoing Ring cycle returns to its fully staged form with a triumphant new Siegfried.

Bumble? Tinder? Who needs a dating app when you have Rabbi David setting up every singleton in sight. Opera Holland Park's new production of L'amico Fritz is a feel good rom-com that will warm the heart.

Three performances in five days take their toll in a tight schedule of this concert production run in the Cotswolds. 

Jonathan Dove's lean reduction of Wagner’s score for just 18 players is performed at the Grimeborn Festival in Julia Burbach's staging. 

Opera Holland Park updates Puccini's setting to the 1960s in a production that does not completely work, but benefits from the strong performance of Elizabeth Llewellyn as its leading lady.

Scottish Opera’s production of Philip Glass and Christopher Hampton's The Trial says less about Kafka’s vision of an absurd world and more about the absurdity of contemporary operatic conventions.

I arrived at the Royal Opera House in the usual way, settled into my seat, and – could you believe it – the opera was gone!

Can classic opera reflect the political status of the society in which it is performed? Calixto Bieito's production of Turandot for Northern Ireland Opera raises some uncomfortable questions.

The Warsaw Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra offered a program of Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Their performance at Cadogan Hall had outstanding moments but overall felt unremarkable.

James MacMillan has honed his first opera Inés de Castro into an unmissable evening:  unspeakably gory but utterly thrilling.

Is it possible for us to feel a shred of sympathy for Lulu, surely one of opera’s most notorious anti-heroines, even when she meets her grizzly demise at the coda of Berg’s eponymous masterwork? I think it speaks volumes about the astonishing quality of soprano Marie Arnet’s performance that my answer to this question after seeing Welsh National Opera’s new production of Lulu is a most definite “n

Scottish Opera’s final production of the season was a revival of the much-loved 1980 production of Tosca by the late Anthony Besch, redirected here by Jonathan Cocker. Besch was struck by the political parallel between the Napoleonic era of the 1800s and Italy under Mussolini in the 1940s, and he made the bold choice to set this production in 1943.

It has become customary to give recent productions of Hänsel and Gretel a modern and often murkier twist, perhaps mirroring the current surge in popularity of darker stories, and the appetite for Nordic noir in particular.

Those of us who are regulars at the Royal Albert Hall know how difficult it can be for an orchestra and choir to really fill that enormous space with sound.