Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Adam Plachetka

A glorious performance of Handel's Biblical oratorio is marred by poor staging.

An epic night at the opera with Joyce DiDonato, which will be hard to forget.

Smetana's Libuše makes a timely reappearance in Prague.

Phelim McDermott’s new Met production is set in Brooklyn’s Coney Island in the late 1950s and is brilliantly vivid looking, but Mozart's music plays second fiddle. 

Tradition and modernity are a mismatch in this uneven production of Mozart’s comic masterpiece.

Under elegant leadership of conductor Harry Bicket, the Met's revival of the "Marriage of Figaro" succeeds with a strong ensemble of cast.

The Dvořákʼs Prague festival wraps with four Prague alumni showing why they've gained international fame.

Setting the opera in the backyard of a suburban house feels refreshingly honest: the ridiculous and simplistic tale of the evil witch, the prince and the maiden is rightfully returned to the arena of children's games, and adults look on indulgently, with a wink.

Don Giovanni is an opera which has as its title character a man who is an unrepentant womaniser, who ultimately receives his just reward in one of the most famous scenes in opera where he is consumed into the fires of hell.

Simon Keenlyside returned to the Met after absence and led a delightful cast of Don Giovanni at the Met.

Any production of Le nozze di Figaro in which both Marcellina and Barbarina give star performances is ensemble casting at its finest.

In the ballad, a lovelorn maiden is finally reunited with her dead lover, who immediately tries to trick her into a midnight wedding at a graveyard after dragging her through muddy swamps filled with ghosts and howling animals. 

A revival of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore at the Met, where Vittorio Grigolo's Nemorino happily ignores most of Bartless Sher's subtexts. 

This production proves that even Mozart’s best-laid plans can be undone.

What makes this Figaro memorable and admirable is the way it manages both to be sprightly in its tone and details and also luxuriant in places that another director might have blown through.

Within Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the darkest corners of the soul are exposed by music, stirred up by the lying, lecherous exploits of the aristocratic scoundrel, Don Giovanni.

Guth's production is beautiful to look at, but fails to bring out the best in Mozart's drama.

A new production of Ariadne auf Naxos is a major draw in itself, but a queue for standing room whose end is on the other side of the opera house is news even in Vienna, especially when the performance is not the première, but the fourth in a run of five and also the one that Franz Welser-Möst left to Jeffrey Tate, who has conducted the piece to positive reviews before.

Alceste is the short and sombre story of a wife who gives her life to save that of her husband, King Admète of Thessaly, a deed which ultimately convinces the gods to reprieve both of them. Gluck, hoping to avoid the over-decorated vocal style then in vogue, set this plot to unadorned vocal lines to give depth to the underlying emotions.

À l'Opéra Garnier, le conte de Rossini est assombri par la mise en scène de Guillaume Gallienne. On se rattrape avec la production dans laquelle se distingue Marianne Crebassa, éblouissante dans le rôle-titre.

Mercredi 16 juillet à 20h, Alain Altinoglu dirigeait l'Orchestre National de France dans un programme intitulé « Autour de 1914 ». A l’opéra Berlioz de Montpellier, Wagner, Stephan, Schubert et Brahms étaient interprétés dans le cadre du festival de Radio France. Un programme d’une grande intensité donnant lieu à un moment de mémoire.