Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Manlio Benzi

François de Carpentries' Oslo production of The Barber of Seville was both unfunny and underwhelming. 

A musically excellent and unpretentious performance of Puccini's masterpiece from Cardiff.

Third time unlucky? After a scorching start to the summer, with superb productions of Il trittico and Flight, Opera Holland Park’s season came unstuck with a horror of a show in Daniel Slater’s Aida.

Martin Lloyd-Evan's highly sensitive production features a show-stealing performance by Richard Burkhard but is marred by problems of orchestral balance.

Whatever Puccini’s Madama Butterfly has going for it, it isn’t suspense – everything that’s going to happen is spelled out the first few pages of the score, as Pinkerton chuckles that the marriage contracts in Japan are as flexible as the property leases, renegotiable on a monthly basis, and toasts the day he gets married “for real” to an American bride.

After their Mascagni debut last year, with L’amico Fritz (the composer’s first post-Cavalleria opera), Opera Holland Park have set out to uncover more music from the so-called ‘one-hit-wonder’ – still known to most for his smash verismo opera alone.

L’immense étoile de l’Opéra de Paris Marie-Agnès Gillot a fait ses adieux à la scène de l’Opéra de Paris fin mars dans l’un des rôles les plus marquants de sa carrière : l’Eurydice du ballet-opéra Orphée et Eurydice de Pina Bausch, chef d’œuvre indépassable du XXè siècle.

In der Göteborger Inszenierung der Butterfly gab es viel zu hören, viel zu sehen, viel zu erleben: so soll Oper sein!