Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Fabio Luisi

María Dueñas’ Tokyo performance of Beethoven's Violin Concerto is less about display than about the living drama between held breath and release. 

As a leading exponent of Franz Schmidt's music, conductor Fabio Luisi leads the NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo in a rare performance of his Fourth Symphony for the orchestra's season opener.

Fabio Luisi conducts the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in a programme that blends two modern works with Beethoven's Ninth.

Conducted by Fabio Luisi, Japan's premier orchestra serves up a superb blend of Eastern and Western music and influences. 

Norma is presented in its original two-soprano version, in the new critical edition by musicologist Roger Parker. 

Fabio Luisi and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra continue their European tour, dropping anchor in Hamburg for Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and a John Williams concerto written for the star German violinist. 

For his performance of Mozart's C major Concerto, Emanuel Ax plays a new concert grand designed by the late architect Rafael Viñoly.

Fabio Luisi leads The Cleveland Orchestra in works of Brahms and Weber, along with a new concerto for piccolo by Oded Zehavi.

The Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai impresses in “bleeding chunks” from Wagner operas at the Festival de Pâques d'Aix-en-Provence.

A somewhat disappointing new production by Hugo de Ana brings I vespri siciliani back to La Scala, where Fabio Luisi leads a successful musical production with a great cast.

For whatever reason Fabio Luisi chose Verdi's Requiem for his inauguration concert with the NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo, it turned out to be an apt and poignant choice.

Barrie Kosky's well-travelled staging reaches Naples with fine performances from orchestra, chorus and singers mixed with some questionable musical and directorial decisions.

Fabio Ceresa applies his "Baroque divertissement" style to Haydn's oratorio The Creation, staged at the Festival della Valle d'Itria.

Luisi hits just the right spot in Bruckner's mighty Seventh Symphony, his final concert as General Music Director of the Zurich Opera.

The towering Fifth Symphony was cohesive and unusually refined, while Peter Mattei brought elegance and passion to Kindertotenlieder.

Luisi programmes Berg, the dark harmonist, and Schubert, the blithe melodist, as a musical yin and yang in Cologne. 

A complex plot with great music and great theatre where Strauss showcases his compositional mastery.

Using the Nazi regime as his Leitmotif, Canadian director Robert Carsen brings Richard Strauss’ Arabella to the Zurich stage. 

The extraordinary Italian pianist Beatrice Rana and the Philharmonia Zürich orchestra under Fabio Luisi lit up the stage in an unforgettable performance. 

This year’s revival of Andreas Homoki's production features excellent principals, choruses, and sublime orchestration under Fabio Luisi’s seasoned baton. The staging takes far fewer accolades.

Andreas Homoki’s new Zurich production capitalises on some quirky staging, but features superb voices in its principal roles and shows the best of the house’s joint choirs.

Giorgio Sangati's staging idea pits Christians vs Saracens as pop stars against dark metal.

Musically, a rewarding Forza, but Homoki's staging is best forgotten.

The in-house orchestra played out of its skin under Fabio Luisi.

The use in the score of ancient musical instruments is what differentiates this work: pifferi, a lute, a “viola pomposa” give this work a distinctive flavour.

Fabio Luisi led The Cleveland Orchestra in Bruckner’s mighty Fourth Symphony, prefaced by a recently composed piano concerto by Sciarrino with Jonathan Biss.

The backstory doesn’t bode well: three fugitive criminals decide to found a city that will pander to society’s most vital needs: food, sex, warfare, and alcohol.

The performance of Margherita d’Anjou seen at the Festival della Valle d’Itria in Martina Franca was the first staged in modern times.

In a new production of Franz Lehár’s The Land of Smiles, the stoic Sou-Chong sets the melancholy tone of the operetta by singing “Smile despite your sorrows and a thousand.. aches and pains”.

That both the lead and a second key role were ill and couldn’t sing did not bode well, yet this performance of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera shook up the house nonetheless.

Nikolaj Znaider and Fabio Luisi, along with NHKSO Tokyo, re-stated the obvious truth of art music that “it is all about the details.”

Fabio Luisi and the DNSO did not disappoint audiences in San Francisco, presenting a captivating program of Beethoven, Strauss and Nielsen.

Not much to set the heart racing in two works of German Romanticism performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Fabio Luisi.

A refined Emperor Concerto from Igor Levit complemented a welcome return to the LSO by Fabio Luisi, exuding calm control and infectious enthusiasm in Brahms' second symphony.

Christian Spuck’s new ballet Messa da Requiem in Zurich, is a breathtakingly powerful achievement. But its profound impact is spurred by more than dance alone.

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.

Fabio Luisi conducts a solidly cast Guillaume Tell with panache, Rossini's final opera returning to the Metropolitan Opera after a long absence. 

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

A long awaited debut for an opera which revealed itself as a Romantic masterpiece.

Andreas Homoki’s new production of Vincenzo Bellini’s I puritani wows with a quartet of stellar vocalists, but its awkward staging and set design are a distinct disappointment.

Mozart’s beauty asserted but never implied, Sir Richard Eyre’s Le nozze di Figaro brings grand complications in bright turns and quick wit.

The Met's new production of Manon Lescaut with Kristine Opolais and Roberto Alagna has great potential to be successful musically, but the production is mixed at best.

The Met’s revival of David McVicar’s year-old take on the perennial Verismo twins strikes out emotionally in Cavalleria rusticana but scores high in Pagliacci. Working on the same set by Rae Smith, flanked by the forbidding stone walls of the town church, Cavalleria is dark, dark, dark – the very picture of a poor, unhappy Sicilian hill town.

A charmingly-retro, Naïf Art production of Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore at Teatro alla Scala provided a refreshing departure from the minimal, post-apocalyptic devastation trends of modern stagecraft.

The plot revolves around the daily life of a simple German town. But this fine production will make you glad that this is not your story.

“Denmark is not all Lego and pastries!” quipped Nikolaj Znaider to the Albert Hall audience. Indeed not. It is the land of Carl Nielsen, whose 150th birthday was celebrated in a packed Prom given by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. 

A rare outing for Giovanni Simon Mayr's Medea in Corinto at the Festival della Valle d’Itria in Martina Franca. 

A dynamic cast recently gave the Zurich audience the “stuffs” of Vincenzo Bellini’s tragic opera: the power of duty, law and honour.