Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Erika Gál

Andrea Brassói-Jőrös shines in the title role of János Szikora's new staging of Dvořák's fairy tale opera. 

With Iréne Theorin's Brünnhilde rejuvenated, the Ring receives a worthy finale at the Budapest Wagner Days.

The pure magic of Ádám Fischer and the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra delights with two brilliant leads, but others disappoint on the second day of Müpa's Ring.

Calixto Bieito takes on Prokofiev's Tolstoy epic – and wins in the opera's Hungarian premiere. 

Considered Hungary's national opera, Ferenc Erkel's Bánk bán rarely travels beyond its borders, but is given a rousing performance by the Hungarian State Opera. 

The Hungarian State Opera presents a new modern production of Don Carlo by a director who depicts the historical cruelty as very much present in our world today.

A Ring cycle of sustained excellence closes with telling contributions from Foster, Vinke and Pesendorfer in the three lead roles.

Müpa's Ring sees all-round musical excellence for a third night in row, which will be remembered more than the various distracting miscues in the staging.

Six excellent singers bring out the best in Wagner's dramatic narrative, marred only by a Ride of the Valkyries that fails to convince.

Hartmut Schörghofer's updated concert staging receives strong singing from everyone and a thrilling orchestral performance.

The Hungarian State Opera's first New York tour featured an opera of forbidden love set in the Biblical Times by Karl Goldmark, and was a rare treat for the New York audience.

With Gergely Kesselyák on double duty as conductor and director, this revival proves musically outstanding but theatrically less than satisfying.

The score of Goldmark's opera is filled with lovely orchestral surprises, in addition to stunning arias, but is often filled with an abundance of slow tempos.

The third installment of Géza M. Tóth's staging of the Ring, this Siegfried is visually striking, but it's only a strong cast, and above all Egils Silins' Wanderer, that makes it worth attending.

This double cast, nine-day revival of Vadim Milkov's staging of Pique Dame offers a relatively straight reading of Tchaikovsky's opera about the obsessive Pushkin-based character Herman. Embracing the opera's choral and dance passages, spectacle and pageantry are paramount; the drama's surreal and more nuanced dimensions could have been better profiled.

Polish opera director Michał Znaniecki created a new version of Zoltán Kodály’s 1927 The Spinning Room, a short one-act which is basically a collection of 21 Hungarian folksongs that Kodály had selected from the Székely region.

Budapest's Wagner Festival opens with an excellent Rheingold in a skilful combination of singing, acting and projections.

The big man in the fat suit rules the show, briging vigour and joie de vivre to Hungarian State Opera's Falstaff.

Solid singing proves to be the main attraction of an ineffective new staging of Die Walküre at the Hungarian State Opera.

Known for her powerful interpretations of the blockbuster Italian mezzo roles, the great Hungarian diva Ildikó Komlósi dominates the new production of Aida in Budapest.

Iréne Théorin provides a spellbinding immolation scene, while Adam Fischer conjures a flawless orchestral performance to conclude Budapest's Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Sometimes the star performer isn’t one of the big romantic headline roles, or even the baritone villain. In this Siegfried, the performance that left me gasping was Gerhard Siegel’s Mime.

This production came together brilliantly to illustrate the story of Das Rheingold. But the star of the show was MüPa’s Béla Bartók Hall, with its extraordinary acoustic.

Im Siegfried geht der Ring als Scherzo weiter und trägt dem mit ironischen Bildern Rechnung.