Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | David Stout

Olivia Fuchs gives a powerful staging of Janáček's morality tale of the perils of eternal youth, with an excellent cast, but there are reservations about the title role.

No hippos in tutus for The Dance of the Hours, but panto frolics abound in Stephen Madcalf's staging in the idyllic Theatre in the Woods. 

Guth's intelligent production comes with a Karita Mattila masterclass and an outstanding cast, intense to the point of pain. 

It’s a small miracle that the production has been recreated so well in such a short time frame.

The French-Sicilian tenor shines in Sir David's McVicar's pristine take on Umberto Giordano's slice of verismo. 

Gorgeous playing under Sir Mark Elder wasn’t enough to mask the lack of theatrical drive in the scrupulously cast Dutch premiere of Delius’ most successful opera.

WNO make a compelling case for Prokofiev's gargantuan War and Peace.

A strong cast take us to the brink of damnation in Welsh National Opera’s revival of Don Giovanni.

Elena Langer's gorgeous and tongue-in-cheek Figaro Gets a Divorce shines in Geneva, despite David Pountney's boxy libretto. 

Renaud Doucet and André Barbe’s La bohème for Scottish Opera set in the jazz-age is packed with Parisian life. 

The Hallé's oddly-ordered Ring arrives at the beginning with Das Rheingold.

John Joubert's opera setting of Charlotte Brontë's masterpiece received its long-awaited world premiere by the English Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Kenneth Woods, with a luminous central performance by soprano April Fredrick.

André Tchaikowsky's version of The Merchant of Venice combines his love of Shakespeare with his recollections of a harsh childhood as a Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Strong vocal and orchestral performances and a tour-de-force staging of Act II light up Grange Park's production of Verdi's political thriller of the dark days of the Spanish inquisition.

Elena Langer and David Pountney's new WNO opera Figaro Gets a Divorce did not disappoint. Langer's new refreshing score had flair and imagination in a memorable performance.

Lothar Koenigs conducted a musically excellent and dramatically straightforward performance of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro in Cardiff.

In spite of the not insignificant problems, Opera Rara are utterly convincing that Leoncavallo's Zazà is a work that should be seen and heard more often.

Opportunities to see Mascagni's Guglielmo Ratcliff come few and far between, mainly because the title role is an absolute killer for any tenor mad enough to attempt it. Step forward, Angelo Villari...

Longborough Festival Opera have opted for Donizetti for the first time, with Don Pasquale.  How successful would the cast be at unleashing the ‘feel-good factor’ of opera buffa?

With ENO having been in the news for all the wrong reasons last week,  it needed Richard Jones' The Mastersingers of Nuremberg to be a great production. Lit up by a towering performance by Iain Paterson, it is.

Full of physical comedy, joyous and enthusiastic, Fiona Shaw's vision of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro makes the most of its taut and energetic plotlines, intense charactisation and beautifully balanced music. 

Last night’s opening of Christopher Alden’s allusive, conceptual Rigoletto for ENO, a co-production with Canadian Opera Company, was a notable event for London opera. Musically, ENO have been on top of their game this season and last night was no exception.

Miraculous as Jonathan Harvey’s music is, it seems reductive to call Wagner Dream an opera. Half the cast, after all, don’t even sing, but act: it’s a sincere meeting of music and theatre in a way that opera usually isn’t.

Few things could unite such a large group of people as the Hallé’s Meistersinger did tonight. Some 515 performers, drawn from three orchestras and five choirs, gathered to present highlights from the first two acts of Wagner’s opera and the third act in full.

Jonathan Miller and ENO’s iconic interpretation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado has returned to the London Coliseum this Christmas, to the delight of G&S fans across the capital, including myself.

Young man spurns the love of a good woman. Time passes. Man realises the error of his ways, but it is too late. It's not exactly the most taxing of plot lines, but in Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin turned it into a masterpiece.

Un Don Giovanni de haute volée porté par un Simon Keenlyside impérial, dans une mise en scène sombre mais d’une efficacité redoutable.