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Unimpeachable voices and fine playing light up The Royal Opera's latest revival of Kasper Holten's dark staging.

This Evangelist had just come straight from Golgotha, where he had witnessed events so momentous he was compelled to recount them at once.

It’s the title character who gets the best tunes in Ariodante and Irish mezzo-soprano Paula Murrihy ate them up. 

In Rautavaara's orchestrations of Sibelius songs, Gerald Finley enveloped every line in refined, sinuous curves, accentuating the music’s rhapsodic quality.

From Fauré and Duparc to Barber, Ives and Copland, the Canadian bass-baritone and Julius Drake explore a range of song.

After a few streamed events with chamber forces, the full orchestra and chorus returned to the House – albeit not in their usual positions – for an entertaining fundraising gala.

“Go big or go home” could easily have been the motto of this summer’s festival. Muti didn’t just go big. He went huge. 

Benjamin Britten's final opera hasn't been staged by The Royal Opera in over 25 years, but his setting of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice receives a great new production by Sir David McVicar. 

Walton's Belshazzar's Feast crowns a dynamic, daring programme from Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra. 

Messrs Rattle and Sellars bewitch the Barbican audience with a sumptuous rendition of Janáček's magnum opus. 

An evening of three Italian opera composers on the concert platform, crowned with a glowing performance of Puccini's rarely heard Messa di Gloria.

Bernard Haitink celebrated an early 90th birthday conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a searching, joyous account of Beethoven's “Choral” Symphony.

Mariusz Treliński's double bill pairing returns to the Metropolitan Opera with fine performances from Sonya Yoncheva and Gerald Finley in the leads. 

International duo give immaculate recital of Beethoven, Schubert, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov songs.

After staged performances in Baden Baden, the Berlin Phil's Parsifal is presented in concert at the Philharmonie, with a couple of key cast changes. 

Dieter Dorn’s staging robbed Wagner’s final masterwork of magic and mystery while Simon Rattle set new speed records.

Schubert song orchestrations with Gerald Finley are not wholly convincing, but the Berliner's virtuosity sweeps all before it in Strauss's Alpensinfonie.

The ninth revival of Jonathan Kent’s production features a great Act 1 and enjoyable Covent Garden role debuts for the three top singers, but misses the mark on the set pieces.

Ailyn Pérez draws every eye and ear to her in an easy-on-the-eye production that doesn't solve some of the work's inherent contradictions.

Rattle conducts Janáček's glorious score with unerring skill and barely concealed adoration, but is let down by his regular collaborator's muddy vision. 

At the Barbican last night, Gerald Finley, John Adams and the BBC Symphony Orchestra combined to deliver the heaviest operatic punch I’ve been subjected to all year.

Gerald Finley's velvet baritone lights up this revival of David McVicar's production of Cilea's murder story

Gerald Finley displayed a voice still in its prime in a rich and diverse recital at the Barbican, elegantly supported by Antonio Pappano on the piano.

Fabio Luisi conducts a solidly cast Guillaume Tell with panache, Rossini's final opera returning to the Metropolitan Opera after a long absence. 

“Honour your masters!” Sachs instructs Walther in the final scene. Wagner's spirit was honoured well as Glyndebourne's festival opened, but did the song contest necessarily crown the right winner?  

A roster of star performers and a sprinkling of maestro magic turn this semi-staged concert into a memorable event. Shame about the big ideas.

A starry night at the Hollywood Bowl for Gustavo Dudamel, Alice Sara Ott, Miah Persson, Gerald Finley and the LA Phil to perform Mozart.

Sadly, Damiano Michieletto and Antonio Pappano's production is more likely to be remembered for its failings – the awful rape scene, its dullness, plus a list of annoying details too long to mention – than for its musical excellence. It’s worth seeing to get a feel of both.

A bearded lady and her taxidermied shark are just two eccentric characters livening up Stravinsky’s 1951 moral fable The Rake’s Progress, though the shark is unique to Jonathan Miller’s revived production. 

Bach is music for the soul, and when excellent musicians are performing it, it cannot fail to be beautiful. Thanks to the considerable strengths of the many involved, there is really no better way to spend a weekend in Lent than lamenting through a Bach Passion in the Konzerthaus. 

Amber Wagner sings Elisabeth with a deepened command and an access to a horizon of sound that make it seem as though her throat had found six more inches of release. It’s a phenomenal performance.

In this minimalist period production of Figaro, the singing and acting are the centre of attention. A very talented cast carries the show, delivering beautiful singing and engaging comedy.

Thierry Fischer and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales presented an eclectic programme, with an exciting première by Simon Holt and the many different facets of 20th century French orchestral music.

What man wants most is that which he cannot have. With a great deal of humour and attention to detail, Dieter Dorn leads Figaro and the household of his baronial palace through its “day of madness” to give us an evening of wonder.

Janáček turned, after a life of much unrest and complexity, to a theme of apparent simplicity shrouding much more complex issues: a fairy tale.

David McVicar's production of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro returns for its sixth revival at the Royal Opera House, the refinement of the production matched, almost at all times, by the performances. 

To really, fully throw yourself into the chilly despair of January’s bitterest blues, you can’t beat an icy, bare-souled stroll through Schubert’s Winterreise. Here it was in the hands of Gerald Finley and Julius Drake at Wigmore Hall.

In one of several (pretty outrageous) notes to conductors in the score of his Roméo et Juliette, Berlioz states that “the average listener has no imagination” and, as a result of this, the sixth movement of the work should be cut in 99 per cent of performances.

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Royal Philharmonic Society, and supporting their ethos of “music for all”, Prom 38 was completely free.

Alan Gilbert’s last few seasons at the New York Philharmonic have featured an opera in June. While previous efforts have featured elaborate staging, this year’s installment, Luigi Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero, was performed in concert. For this particular work, which was written for radio broadcast, this seems only appropriate.

“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted”, says the scripture, and it was so last night as Peter Oundjian conducted the mournful music of Brahms and Lieberson. Wave after wave of the rich textures of grieving arose and subsided in song, leaving in their wake the energy of reconciliation.The grieving of Peter Lieberson is deep.

The haze of the surreal, somnambulistic nightscape of Witold Lutosławski’s Les espaces du sommeil cast its strange pall over the expanse of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s December 7 concert at Walt Disney Hall with Esa-Pekka Salonen at the podium.

Every opera should have at least one of those “wow” moments that lift you out of your seat and have you singing them in your head on the way home.

The first night of the Proms was, in this year of Olympic celebrations and the Diamond Jubilee, a tribute to all things English, featuring an impressive range of singers and a (somewhat appropriate) relay team of stellar English conductors. The programme began with a strange mixture of old and new.

This opening concert to Vienna OsterKlang festival was a reproduction of sorts: on 5th April 1803 a slate of Beethoven works including the first and second symphonies, the third piano concerto and the oratorio Christus am Ölberge was performed in this very theatre.

Of all the 'time arts', music is arguably best placed to convey impermanence. Frikki Walker's excellent pre-concert talk – the most philosophical I've experienced at an RSNO Friday evening concert – set this train of thought in motion.

It's the most spectacular entrance in opera: the giant stone statue bursts in to join Don Giovanni at the dinner table; a pair of sweeping downward octave swoops in D minor fills the audience (and the hapless Leporello) with terror at the rake's imminent descent into hell.OK, that was a spoiler, but then we all know the story: a production of Don Giovanni is all about how you tell it.

There is an electric guitar on stage at Boston's Symphony Hall, and it is not a Pops concert.John Harbison's Symphony no. 5 for baritone, mezzo-soprano and orchestra up-ends what we think of as a symphony, presenting the voice as an instrument and recalibrating the form.

Carmen is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world, and with such a variety of interpretations out there it is always difficult to come up with a new one which is simultaneously inventive and effective.

In case you've somehow missed the hype, Anna Nicole is the Royal Opera's newly commissioned opera about the life of Anna Nicole Smith, a girl from Texas who married an elderly billionnaire, became a model and celebrity sex symbol who received gigantic media exposure, and died of a drug overdose a few months after the death of her son.