Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | James Laing

Opha Phelan’s staging presents the action as a grand, Freudian social experiment. It’s a risk – but the production is lifted by outstanding performances from the cast and the Academy of Ancient Music.

Jonathan Dove’s opera Flight earns its title as the most popular modern opera with this excellent ensemble performance in Adelaide, its Australian premiere. 

Sir David Pountney directs a satirical take on dictatorship and the climate crisis inventively set to the music of Purcell. 

Director Adele Thomas can do no wrong, sustaining her extraordinary run of fizz with this unlikely concatenation of four Handel cantatas at Stone Nest.

In its Royal Opera House debut, Irish National Opera's high-energy Bajazet provides a great evening for Baroque fans and sceptics alike.

Ivor Bolton and Kit Hesketh-Harvey deliver a brilliant political thriller and anti-Putin polemic – at least for its first half.

In 1724, Handel's Giulio Cesare was a vehicle for star singers Senesino and Francesca Cuzzoni. Maria Sanner and Lucie Chartin step into their shoes with great success for this Opera North revival. 

Visual eye candy, excellent singing and superb Handelian playing by Laurence Cummings and the London Handel Orchestra are marred by poor diction and limited acting expressivity.

Jonathan Dove’s witty Flight at Scottish Opera is finely sung by a tight ensemble with standout performances from Jennifer France and James Laing.

A decent cast was unable to redeem a fundamentally dull opera that lacks the psycholgical complexity and tension of both the original Graham novel and its famous Hitchcock adaptation.

Christopher Alden's account of Handel's love pentangle is long on Man Ray imagery and modern language wordplay, but never hits the vocal highs and eventually palls.

Meditations from the Bach family on the human condition in "Cantatas for the soul" performed by the Dunedin Consort in Ta Giezu Church at the Valletta International Baroque Festival.

Historically informed baroque gestures and ballet additions: Handel's only operetta gets a rare airing and a musical makeover in Sigried T'Hooft's new production for Gottingen's International Handel Festival.

Flight represents a brave new departure for Opera Holland Park, the first contemporary opera to take to its main stage, in a striking staging with top quality musical performances. 

At carnival time, Cavalli’s mission was to make his audience laugh, wow them with a bit of vocal gymnastics, butter up their romantic feelings with a few delicate cadences, and maybe leave a tear or two in their eye. It’s a potent formula, and it still works.

Paul McMcreesh leads Royal Northern Sinfonia and their chorus in a Messiah that deliveres all the intoxicating excitement of Handel's operatic writing. 

Opera North's static production of Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea directed by Tim Albery takes place in a murderous psychopath’s private cellar. 

Chalk and talk is dead. Teachers scramble to bring history to life in classrooms up and down the country through dressing-up days and interactive whiteboard activities. Few, however, can equal Robert Carsen’s efforts in his riotous production of Handel’s Rinaldo, here on its first Glyndebourne revival since its 2011 première.

There is something pleasurably straining, for the big-hall, velvet-accustomed operagoer, about the experience of sitting for three hours on a very tiny bench in a charmingly chiselled, candlelit little theatre that invites contemplation in its own right – beyond the attractions, musical and other, set up within its frame.

The impressively well-drilled children’s chorus dominates this glittering production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the second component of Opera North’s Festival of Britten. 20 young performers in white, black wings on their fairy shoulders, wind solemnly in and out of the action, assemble in rows, perform versions of callisthenics exercises, and sing beautifully.

This week the Linbury Studio Theatre attracted an audience of the more minute variety with its dazzling production of The Firework-Maker’s Daughter. Based on Philip Pullman’s novel, the two-act opera transported its listeners into the realms of the Far East with papery costumes, Indonesian shadow puppetry and hand-crafted pyrotechnics.

With such a star-studded line-up at a concert that had been sold out for weeks, this was always going to be an evening to remember. Bach’s St Matthew Passion is one of those iconic pieces that never gets old, and every time I hear the throbbing bass of the opening chorus, I still get a tingle of excitement.

The Roman emperor Julius Caesar’s entanglement with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra is one of the best-known love stories of all time, and the operatic re-telling by George Frideric Handel, with its incredible music and universal themes of war, passion and politics, is experiencing a resurgence.

Ewig faszinierender Shakespeare in zeitgenössischer Musik und modernem Gewand, das „hat was“.