Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Robert Hayward

Robert Hayward was unafraid to 'go ugly' when need be in Jurowski's symphonically executed concert performance. 

A thrilling concert by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain conducted by Sir Mark Elder culminated in a sinister and atmospheric performance of Duke Bluebeard's Castle.

David Pountney's House of the Dead makes for high entertainment at Welsh National Opera.

Welsh National Opera’s new season commemorating the centenary of the 1917 Revolution with three Russian-themed works opens with both a bang and a whimper with this trenchant revival.

Karen Cargill returns to Scottish Opera as Judith in Bluebeard’s Castle in a double bill with The 8th Door, a new opera from Lliam Paterson and Vanishing Point’s Matthew Lenton.

In Anna Russell's wittily deadpan analysis of Wagner's Ring cycle, she describes Wotan as “the head god” – pausing for dramatic effect before adding “and he's a crashing bore too.”

Opera North's Andrea Chénier at Leeds Grand Theatre directed by Annabel Arden is full of modern relevance and a fine start to the new season

Dmitri Tcherniakov turns Shostakovich's "satirical tragedy" into a riveting piece of theatre, help by an outstanding performance from Patricia Racette and a top class orchestral performance from new ENO Musical Director Mark Wigglesworth.

Barrie Kosky's production of Schoenberg's unfinished masterpiece is brought to musical life by Vladimir Jurowski's intense and compelling interpretation.

Where is the line? Where does the stage end and the audience begin? This is what Australian director Barrie Kosky probes in his production pairing Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle.

How does Usher House stand up? Like the house, it doesn’t. Welsh National Opera's double bill based on The Fall of the House of Usher underwhelms.

Opera North's La Fanciulla del West, directed by Aletta Collins, contains a bold performance from Alwyn Mellor as Minnie, and a powerful Ramerrez in Rafael Rojas.

A very welcome and triumphant revival of Peter Grimes begins Opera North’s Festival of Britten season, soon to be followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Death in Venice. The work has often been described as Britten’s greatest, the paeans of praise beginning soon after its first performance just after the Second World War, often involving the word “enigma”.

Twenty-eight immobile cast members faced the audience from the long white bench which comprised the totality of Katrin Lea Tag’s bare set. Meanwhile, a floor-level, period instrument orchestra delivered the attention-grabbing, minor key Overture to Purcell's 1688 Dido and Aeneas.

At the end of the season, and before closing for the summer break, the Komische Oper Berlin reprise some of their most successful recent productions for one night only in the Komische Oper Festival, including the popular “cartoon” Magic Flute. Included in this busy week was a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, a rarely performed epic opera of battle-torn love and murder.

You can’t accuse Vladimir Jurowski of lacking ambition. This LPO concert of his, featuring artfully sequenced works by Beethoven, Schoenberg and Nono, was dedicated “to all the people in the world who are still suffering injustice”.

In a promotional video for Opera North's new production of From The House of the Dead, director John Fulljames gives us two seemingly opposing views on Leoš Janáček's final opera- that it is “the most intense opera of the twentieth century,” but also a piece in which “very little happens.