Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Christopher Maltman

Thea Musgrave’s pictorial writing sits well next to an exhilarating Vaughan Williams Sea Symphony. 

The Minnesota Chorale does Leonard Bernstein and Sir William Walton proud, with the Bernstein Chichester Psalms a particularly impressive presentation.  

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. 

The current stage-setting of Arabella at the Wiener Staatsoper proves that “all that’s Glittenberg” is not gold.

Issues that cropped up in the first run of Mitchell's production have been ironed out. In the hands of a strong cast, a chilling interpretation of Donizetti's masterpiece.

Iván Fischer's minimalist staging of Don Giovanni makes a triumphant return to Mupa, Budapest.

The musical glories of Schreker’s glistening, late-Romantic score are laid bare in the Bavarian State Opera’s first production of Die Gezeichneten since 1919.

Clarity and mounting horror in the orchestra pit, the full truth and ugliness of the human condition onstage. Dutch National Opera’s new production of Wozzeck is stomach-churning for all the right reasons.

At 82, Sir Roger Norrington may have slowed down his conducting career but I’m very pleased to report that he still loves stirring things up at his concerts.

Anna Netrebko scored an unmitigated success in her first Manon Lescaut at the Met, almost obliterating director Richard Eyre’s and designer Rob Howell’s misconceived production.

This was one of those concert programmes that you will only find at the Proms – a richly varied group of works by Bayan Northcott, Mozart and Zemlinsky.

The Netherlands Chamber Orchestra was in glittering form, while strong singing and acting enhanced each other in the evocative woodland of Claus Guth’s Don Giovanni.

Kasper Holten's new production fails to convince about the alleged virtues of Wagner's outcast comic opera.

Tchaikovsky’s passionate drama is put into the deep-freeze by chilly stage designs.

A mixed programme thrills, launching the season with a bang

Kasper Holten's virtuosic staging is revived by the Royal Opera with a cast of three exceptionally strong women, and accomplished performances by Christopher Maltman and Alex Esposito as the Don and his servant.

A triumph for Los Angeles Opera's new production of John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles.

There’s nothing like a trip to The Barber to refresh you. This season, the Metropolitan Opera revives Bartlett Sher’s 2006 production of Rossini’s comic masterpiece, The Barber of Seville. 

Richard Egarr leads the Academy of Ancient Music and a stellar team of vocal soloists in an unapologetically lush and dramatic St Matthew Passion.

If Count Almaviva (to say nothing of Don Giovanni) were alive today, he might perhaps enlist Richard Dawkins to defend his behaviour. We know from evolutionary biology that the male stands the best chance of passing on his genes if he has many partners, the female if she can keep the male around to help raise the children he’s had with her.

Even Emperor Josef II would have thought this was a bad idea. The real-life monarch depicted in Peter Shaffer’s fictional play Amadeus quite memorably forbade ballet in his court operas. But the absurdity of the dancers carrying on with no music playing in Mozart’s Act III convinced the Emperor that he was in the wrong.

How, I wonder, is it best for an opera company to treat a revival of a well-aired, well-liked, decent but not particularly radical production of a top ten opera? This was what the Royal Opera had to contend with in this season’s revival of David McVicar’s 2003 setting of Die Zauberflöte: many in the audience will have known every note of the opera, and several will have been thoroughly famili

I don’t think Valery Gergiev has ever been out to claim that Brahms and Szymanowski were particularly similar composers. I certainly hope he hasn’t, at any rate, on the basis of his final LSO programme pairing the two of them.

The music of Bradford-born composer Frederick Delius (1862–1934) is a love or hate affair. Whether you bask in the romantic lushness of his godless and nature-influenced ramblings, or find yourself drowning in a poor-quality school soup consisting of unappetisingly vague harmonic shifts, he is a composer that inspires passionate discussion.

Strauss's Tod und Verklärung is the work of a young man seeking to impress with his profundity and modernity after his early success with the wildly exuberant Don Juan. It is often said that the "death" part is more convincing than the "transfiguration" part, and this is largely true - while the former comes off beautifully, the latter is far too prosaic musically for the exalted subject matter.

I've commented before about Die Zauberflöte that if you get the music right, the rest will follow. In the first night of the Royal Opera's latest revival of David MacVicar's 2003 production, Sir Colin Davis definitely got the music right.

Bei diesem Repertoireabend in der Wiener Staatsoper entschädigte das auf höchstem Niveau agierende Sängerensemble für eine Inszenierung, die außer Schnee und Eis nicht sonderlich viel zu bieten hat.

Dass Falstaff auch konzertant seinen spitzbübischen Charme behalten kann, zeigte das BRSO unter Daniel Harding: das großartige Ensemble ließ nichts vermissen.

Wild, grob und grausam - bei der diesjährigen Eröffnung der Pfingstfestspiele wird Glucks Iphigénie en Tauride in eine kalte Gegenwart versetzt und ein ungeschönter Blick auf menschliche Abgründe geworfen. Umso strahlender tritt dabei einmal wieder die musikalische Qualität der Festspiele und allen voran Cecilia Bartoli in den Vordergrund.

Was haben eine betrogene Backpackerin, ein nackter Alter, ein prolliger Frauenheld und ein düsterer Containerbahnhof mit Mozarts Oper Don Giovanni gemeinsam? Nicht viel. Stefan Kimmigs Inszenierung an der Bayerischen Staatsoper ist sehr modern und hinterlässt den Zuschauer ratlos – im Gegensatz zum hervorragenden Ensemble.