Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Sarah Castle

Director Anapela Polata’ivao handles her mixed forces of amateurs and professionals with seamless assurance, the crowds’ movements across the stage showing both clarity and intent. 

The Zurich opera house launches a novel production of Stefan Wirth's new opera in three movements based on the popular 1999 novel by Tracy Chevalier. 

Nine symphonies, five orchestras, two days: an immersive weekend as part of the Barbican's Beethoven 250 coverage featuring some of the UK's finest orchestras. 

The final instalment of the Hong Kong Philharmonic's Ring cycle merits the orchestra joining the international big league. 

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.

Crowning this cycle came a truly magnificent performance of Götterdämmerung, centred very much on Richard Farnes and his orchestra.

In Anna Russell's wittily deadpan analysis of Wagner's Ring cycle, she describes Wotan as “the head god” – pausing for dramatic effect before adding “and he's a crashing bore too.”

Opera North's cycle offers a form of personal Wagner therapy: all four music dramas in concert performances, but with carefully choreographed video and lighting effects. 

Mahler's epic setting of the final scene from Goethe's Faust is so demanding of musical resources that any performance is a special occasion: what better work to conclude the Orchestra Of Opera North's triumphant 2015-2016 season? 

A brilliantly successful performance of Götterdämmerung by Opera North to bring its four-year Ring to a fiery close. 

While this concert’s marketing was focused on Mozart’s Requiem, it was Haydn in the first half that made the greater impact, in the form of an ecstatically virtuosic performance of his Cello Concerto no. 1 with soloist Alban Gerhardt. Passagework was everywhere immaculately tuned and played with perfect dexterity, Gerhardt’s fingers dancing up and down the instrument with tremendous velocity.

Celebrating the Wagner centenary in 1913, the Hallé Orchestra gave a concert performance in Manchester of Acts II and III from Wagner’s epic final masterpiece Parsifal.

The new Netherlands Opera performance of Richard Wagner’s only comic opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was an absolute success. Spanning a daunting four-and-a-half hours, the evening kept us wanting more rather than searching for the clock.

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.

Auckland choir Viva Voce’s final offering for the year was a semi-staged performance of Handel’s late oratorio Solomon. An attempt to stage Solomon must deal with two important issues: firstly, not a lot dramatic happens to actually stage, and secondly, the three acts bear little dramatic relation to each other.

If you've been brought up with the Judaeo-Christian ideal of an all-powerful, all-good God, Norse mythology can come as a bit of a shock. Wotan, the father of the gods, is philandering, deceitful, power-hungry, sentimental, violent and ultimately weak - the gamut of human frailties writ large.

The Hallé Orchestra, led by Sir Mark Elder, followed their award-winning 2009 Götterdämmerung with a concert performance of Die Walküre over two nights, prefaced by Gerard McBurney’s new work, The Madness of an Extraordinary Plan. With an array of famed soloists, Elder masterminded a triumph, with the magnificent Hallé showing their quality on the concert stage.

Wagner's Die Walküre was split into two concert performances over two days, the first on one evening and the second on an afternoon and an evening. This review is for both. A spot picks out a man in the Bridgewater Hall’s front row, who steps up to stand by a table in front of the Hallé Orchestra, which is ready to begin. He puts on a braided coat to become Richard Wagner.