Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Laurence Cummings

The music plays second fiddle to Australian circus company Circa in Yaron Lifschitz’s production of Gluck's great opera. 

The greatest music of the 18th century – no arguments, please – is given a fine reading at London's Barbican. 

Laurence Cummings and the AAM serve up Messiah-shaped serenity at the Barbican. 

Ovid’s Metamorphoses makes an ideal curtain-raiser to the Academy of Ancient Music's new season, with works by Charpentier and Rameau conducted by Laurence Cummings... who also sings! 

“A concert performance with neither scenery nor action would be a sacrilege,” wrote one authority of this opera. Nobody told the Academy of Ancient Music...

Louise Alder shines as Cleopatra, one of Baroque opera’s greatest creations, in the fourth Glyndebourne revival of Sir David McVicar's much-loved production. 

Countertenor Reginald Mobley and the Academy of Ancient Music shine in an alternative history of English Baroque, with a new work by Roderick Williams. 

Music from the court of Louis XIV – Lully, Jacquet de la Guerre, Rebel and others – is superbly played. But the attempt to put it in the context of the dances of the day is perhaps over-ambitious.

A claim was made not to authenticity, but merely to “a chance to hear the work anew”.

A glorious Esther from Laurence Cummings and the London Handel Singers and Orchestra, with a classy line-up of soloists led by Nardus Williams and Tim Mead.

All six concertos in one evening at Milton Court, presented with verve and talent by the Academy of Ancient Music and Laurence Cummings. 

Handel's last oratorio is stylishly set in the composer’s era, with an all-star cast of Handelian singers who give their all.

Majestic performances all round in Handel's oratorio, with a strong solo team led by Allan Clayton as Samson, and a convincingly well-drilled performance from the Philharmonia Chorus.

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

The collaboration of Opera North and South Asian Arts is a thrilling celebration of renaissance opera and Indian classical music.

Laurence Cummings and The English Concert deliver musical excellence in a wonderfully designed and choreographed production.

On Easter Monday, this year's London Handel Festival came to a close with Handel's youthful oratorio La Resurrezione in the suitably Baroque setting of London's St Martin-in-the-Fields.

There was a celebratory atmosphere to launch the 2022 festival, including royal fireworks and coronation anthems, but it was Ukrainian mezzo Anna Starushkevych who provided the evening's most moving moment. 

Alcina also disappoints as a showcase for sustainable opera, despite that being Opera North’s pledge for this production. 

A delightful performance of Haydn's oratorio, streamed from the Barbican all the way to our reviewer in Australia. 

Handel's Rodelinda comes to Göttingen a year after the planned centennial anniversary event, but is worth the wait with respect to musical values led by conductor Laurence Cummings with Anna Dennis in the title role.

Handel’s Messiah is not too re-imagined, thankfully, with an almost Crystal Palace sized choir although not all singing at once!

Lawrence Cummings conducts Zurich’s Orchestra La Scintilla in Handel’s oratorio-cum-opera, Belshazzar. The music was celestial; the staging was a bombastic mix of excess and vaudeville.

Centuries can envelop a musical masterpiece in a cocoon of misconceptions and false interpretations as much they leave their mark in the form of dirt and grime on a painting’s surface.

Laurence Cummings conducting the FestspielOrchester Göttingen and the NDR Chor, with an exemplary suite of vocal soloists, but a slightly problematic venue, sweep all before them in the Handel Festival of 2020.

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.

Royal Academy Opera maintains its usual high standards in a production of Handel’s operatic oratorio, a showcase for the singers of the future.

Barrie Kosky's punchy, visually exhilarating take on Saul, with Iestyn Davies as a sublime David, makes for a powerful evening of drama at Glyndebourne.

This year’s Gala Conzert at Göttingen featured two different works not commonly heard and certainly not together, with excellent soloists and the Christ Church Cathedral Choir

Laurence Cummings leads the FestspielOrchester Göttingen, the NDR Choir and an exemplary set of soloists led by in a definitive performance of Handel's oratorio.

A compelling and energetic debut production from a new opera company in the raddled surroundings of Wilton's Music Hall.

The fashion for reviving Mozart's teenage operas brings a vocally dazzling production of Lucio Silla to Buxton, nevertheless hampered by the work's own lack of believable drama and some fairly flat staging. 

Brockes-Passion is becoming not quite the performing rarity it once was, and this outstanding performance at the Göttingen Handel Festival this year could hardly be bettered.

Handel's Opera Lotario is the centrepiece for this year's Göttingen Handel festival, receiving warm acclaim on its opening night.

The return of Dominique Labelle to the Göttingen Handel Festival produces a concert to treasure, the highlight being Telemann's dramatic cantata Ino.

Salvation sweetness and light in DC's annual Messiah.

Laurence Cummings and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment celebrate two anniversaries in a programmed of works by Johann Sebastian Bach and his sons. 

Handel's psychotic Tartar leader and bedhopping nobles are well served in an excellent collaboration between the Buxton Festival and the English Concert with some outstanding singing from Marie Lys and Owen Willetts.

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.

Handel's Susanna at the Göttingen International Handel Festival is unforgettable, a revelation.

Englishman Laurence Dale’s Göttingen Festival production of Handel’s Agrippina, now presented in the second Brisbane Baroque Festival, is based on the political void between appearance and reality. 

An impressive display of singing technique isn't enough to make RCM's Ariodante connect with hearts and minds.

King Arthur, an action-packed five-act semi- or "dramatick” opera with music by Henry Purcell and libretto by John Dryden, took on an entirely new face at its recent Zurich première.

Barrie Kosky's production, revived for the tour, turns Handel’s 1739 Old Testament oratorio Saul into a gripping psychodrama. 

A reconstruction of a long-lost opera by Handel gives some exciting young singers the chance to shine at the London Handel Festival, even if the plot might be better back in the mists of obscurity. 

Is Handel’s Semele an oratorio or an opera? Of course Handel himself called it an oratorio but some suggest it is the English-language opera that he never wrote. 

In Peter Sellars' reconstruction of Purcell's unfinished semi-opera The Indian Queen, fine vocal performances are spoilt by indifferent staging and choreography and an embarrassing retelling of the Conquistador story.

Laurence Cummings and Royal Northern Sinfonia round off their week of Bach concerts at Sage Gateshead with joyful orchestral music, and Bach's miniature comic opera.

Laurence Cummings and Royal Northern Sinfonia present Bach's musical world in miniature in a programme of chamber music by Bach and his contemporaries.