Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Sir Simon Rattle

Robert Carsen's new production of Janáček’s The Excursions of Mr Brouček for the Staatsoper Unter den Linden scores a well-deserved success thanks to a stellar – or rather, lunar – conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.

A deeply satisfying performance of Vaughan Williams' Fifth Symphony crowns an excellent evening of English repertoire at the Barbican. 

High contrasts of light and darkness make a special event in Boulez, Benjamin and Brahms at the Barbican. 

Stunning orchestral colour from the BRSO, with command and total coherency from Sir Simon Rattle in Mahler's “Tragic” Symphony.

Sir Simon Rattle awards Thomas Adès a Royal Philharmonic Society medal during the first visit this summer of the BRSO to the BBC Proms. 

As this season's Composer-in-Residence, Jörg Widmann premieres his Horn Concerto at Berlin's Philharmonie, with dedicatee Stephan Dohr as soloist and Sir Simon Rattle conducting. 

Winding up his inaugural tour with the BRSO, new Chief Conductor Sir Simon Rattle delivered a superbly performed program of Wagner, Adès and Beethoven. 

After an eight-year absence, Rattle returned to deliver the kind of Mahler performance only he can offer: probingly intelligent and wonderfully idiosyncratic.

Rattle and a large-format LSO produce a Shostakovich 4 to remember, with exceptional sound quality from every musician.

Sir Simon Rattle, Tim Reynish and Clark Rundell take the baton in turn, to celebrate the past and present of Liverpool’s Youth Orchestras. 

The Czech Philharmonic dazzles with Yuja Wang at the piano and makes history with Sir Simon Rattle on the podium.

Who needs a stage, sets or costumes, when opera can move us like this? Agneta Eichenholz leads a terrific cast in a concert performance of Janáček's searing opera. 

Reuniting two old friends and collaborators, the Staatsoper Berlin presents a new production of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Médée, with mixed results. 

Sir Simon Rattle ends his tenure as Music Director of the LSO with a cry for liberty and arguably the greatest of all farewell symphonies.

A Schumann premiere at the BBC Proms, revived with loving care by Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO. 

Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO give an orchestral performance to remember, with a fine singing cast, but Simon McBurney's staging dials the bleakness to maximum too early.

Betsy Jolas delivers a farewell gift – at 96, her own final orchestral work – to Sir Simon Rattle on the occasion of his final Barbican concerts as the LSO's Music Director. 

In the last of the LSO's Sydney concerts, Sir Simon Rattle's affinity with Bruckner's score results in a heartfelt performance of the Seventh Symphony.

The LSO opens its three-concert Sydney stay with a panoply of colours and virtuoso orchestral playing in a programme of Adams, Debussy and Ravel, under the masterful leadership of Sir Simon Rattle

Rarely does a concert entirely devoted to a big Mahler Symphony later acquire a second half, let alone one containing just twenty minutes of a cappella singing. 

Magdalena Kožená provides a compelling case for two little-heard Martinů song cycles; Rattle and the Czech Phil are competent but not altogether convincing in Schumann.

A long stellar night of supremely assured singing and playing in Wagner's Siegfried, with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle on top form.

Amanda Majeski reprises her peerless Kátya, but Katarina Dalayman's flint-like characterisation as Kabanicha strikes the most sparks.

Contemplation and reflection should ideally form a counterpoint to jollity and merry-making in the festive season: an object-lesson from Sir Simon Rattle and his supporting forces.

Sir Simon Rattle's “Stravinsky Journey” threads a string of miniatures to persuade the audience that there's more to Stravinsky than his three early Ballets Russes hits. 

The last conductor to have led such a superb account of Rachmaninov's Third Symphony was quite possibly its composer.

With fresh programming and superb performances, artists-in-residence Magdalena Kožená and Sir Simon Rattle add another dimension to the Czech Philharmonic season.

After their magnificent recent Sibelius Seventh, the LSO returns to the Finnish composer for a pair of tone poems, followed by Bruckner's Seventh. 

Conducting a programme of mostly 20th-century classics that could have come from his early glory days in Birmingham, Rattle was in his element.

The massed ranks of the LSO, the London Symphony and CBSO Choruses, Dame Sarah Connolly and Louise Alder gather for a staggering Mahler 2 at the BBC Proms. 

Sir Simon Rattle conducts 80+ members of the LSO in the monumental Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale in a site-specific performance inside – and outside – St Paul’s Cathedral.

Expect the unexpected when Sir Simon Rattle conducts the LSO. There will always be something that works, and sharpens your musical sensibilities, and something that doesn't. Ligeti, Wagner and Jolas vie for attention with Brahms.

Problems of balance bedevilled a fine programme of some of Weill's most bitter, ironical works which improved substantially after the interval.

An unusual collection of five disparate shorter orchestral works made for a fascinating celebration of Sir Simon Rattle’s musical enthusiasms over his career.

Director Claus Guth's new production for the Staatsoper Berlin is a bit of a mixed bag but the evening succeeds more on its musical merits, with a splendid ensemble of singers and orchestra conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.

True to himself, Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO offered a mouth-watering programme of contrasts. The first half pointing clearly to the modern world worked better than the backward glance at a great Romantic symphony.

Hans Keller's mischievous essay on “Phoney Professions” lists  both viola players (“it’s just a big violin”) and conductors among its targets. This performance refuted that, as surely as it delighted everyone else.

Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO open their 2021-22 season with an eclectic mix of British music that sees the orchestra at its most lustrous. 

Were we to celebrate a great artist fifty years after his death with three misbegotten attempts at a form he never understood?

The Festival d'Aix-en-Provence gives us a definitive performance of Wagner's opera – but for listening only.

The Berlin Philharmonic, reunited with its former chief conductor Sir Simon Rattle, framed Britten’s Serenade, commandingly sung by tenor Andrew Staples, with two complementary sets of orchestral variations.

Rattle leads the London Symphony Orchestra on a journey to his adoptive country, without so much as a lateral flow test to hold them up.

Before the pandemic, it was easy to take concert-going for granted, that communal sharing of classical music. One day after the easing of lockdown, the London Symphony Orchestra returned to its Barbican home to play for an audience for the first time since 15th March 2020. 

Magdalena Kožená's excellence of tone and line in her first two songs did not prepare us for her profundity in Der Abschied.

The soprano seemed to be duetting with players as much as conducting them in Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra's new chief conductor revels in a flawless performance from his star players.

Although Damiano Michieletto's new production resembles an expensive drama workshop, it’s the marvellous performances that make this such a moving Jenůfa.

One of those performances when the sheer physical beauty of the instruments and the sounds they were making became the organic nature of the music itself.

A programme of great contrasts as the first concert is streamed since it was announced that Sir Simon Rattle will leave the LSO in 2023.