Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Susan Bickley

Damiano Michieletto’s production of Janáček’s opera breaks a key tenet of high-concept opera: where it should reveal, it obfuscates. 

Mark-Anthony Turnage's operatic adaptation of Thomas Vinterberg's tale of abuse provides rich entertainment even as it shocks.

Margaret Atwood’s dystopic novel, masterfully adapted for the operatic stage, is strongly performed at ENO and rings even truer today than it did when it was written.

A forgettable Hansel and Gretel is the worst offence of Antony McDonald’s leaden staging which returns to Covent Garden. 

Foccroulle’s limited score imitates environmental catastrophe while Jocelyn’s libretto tries – unevenly – to understand why we might ignore it.

 Poul Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale comes home to English National Opera after 20 years in a powerful new production by Annilese Miskimmon.

Richard Jones' setting is superb in its bare minimalism, but he pays great attention to all the psychological nuances in Janáček's opera. 

An incandescent concert performance of Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage launches a new era for the London Philharmonic under principal conductor Edward Gardner.

The Royal Opera House responds to current global turmoil with a double bill by four women composers. Baritone Peter Brathwaite delivers a tour de force in The Knife of Dawn and A New Dark Age is a powerful emotional journey.

A witty, insightful production at the Coliseum fizzes with comedy and pathos. 

Comic opera can fall flat, but if The Grange Festival's new production of Verdi's final masterpiece is a total delight, with a strong concept and a strong cast. This is country-house opera at its best.

Amanda Majeski is magnificent in the title role; Ed Gardner shows total master of Janáček's music. But that's not enough to rescue a poorly thought out Richard Jones production.

Mark-Anthony Turnage's First World War opera both moves and dazzles at the Barbican.

ENO's new production of Salome which opens the season features some commendable music-making, but is let down by a flawed concept and dull staging.

A programme of new music and 20th-century classics reflects on loss, war, inhumanity and redemption. 

Tough, thrilling, ambitious and new: The Skating Rink is an exciting new major commission by Garsington, and its world première delivered on every level.

Jake Heggie's spectacular vocal writing combine with Terence McNally's perfectly paced libretto to provide intense music drama which forces you to confront darkness.

A series of ill-advised staging choices leads to a disappointingly drab performance of Monteverdi's Homeric epic.

Stuart Skelton’s visceral Peter Grimes is matched by a strong cast with thrilling playing and singing from the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Edward Gardner.

In a concert of two halves, Worcester Cathedral experiences unforgettable pain and pleasure in works by Strauss, Rasch and Janáček.

Debussy’s opera of half-lights succeeds in taming the glare of the midsummer sun in Garsington’s new staging.

An operatic take on The Winter's Tale – categorised as one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’ – premieres at English National Opera. 

An excellent performance of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s The Last Supper receiving its Scottish première, with Roderick Williams and Susan Bickley heading a luxury cast.

The Hallé's oddly-ordered Ring arrives at the beginning with Das Rheingold.

I arrived at the Royal Opera House in the usual way, settled into my seat, and – could you believe it – the opera was gone!

Wagner's Die Walküre and Tippett's A Child of Our Time both attempt to capture the essence of humanity. Despite making for an unusual pairing, the programme was an effective one.

1960s kitsch set in old Seville, excellent acting and movement direction combines with strong singing and immaculate playing from the OAE to make Glyndeboune's Le nozze di Figaro a triumph.

Lothar Koenigs conducted a musically excellent and dramatically straightforward performance of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro in Cardiff.

The BBC Philharmonic brought us a fascinating programme of intriguingly juxtaposed perspectives from the old world and the new, before a heartfelt return to the European tradition.

Opera North's captivating production of Janáček’s Jenůfa directed by Tom Cairns at the Grand Theatre Leeds

A successful concert hall Rake's Progress at the Edinburgh International Festival with an impressively strong cast of singers, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Royal Conservatoire Voices under Sir Andrew Davis.

Gustave Charpentier's Louise, revived and in excellent form at the Buxton Festival.

A new co-commissioned production from English National Opera and the Barbican sees Tansy Davies tackle the most harrrowing of modern subjects: 9/11.

Former RSC Artistic Director Michael Boyd imparts a distinctly Shakespearean flavour to Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in this first collaboration between the Royal Opera and the Roundhouse.

The Dallas Opera adds a light touch to a Richard Strauss' decidedly unfunny opera Salome, featuring soprano Deborah Voigt in the title role. 

Royal Opera’s first rival of Anna Nicole opens to an enthusiastic student audience. Eva-Maria Westbroek dazzles, but second time round the work seems even more burned by its clumsy libretto.

A brilliantly successful performance of Götterdämmerung by Opera North to bring its four-year Ring to a fiery close. 

Julian Anderson’s Thebans, a bold attempt at condensing Sophocles’ three Theban plays into a single opera. The result is a powerful piece of theatre which drags the audience into the story of Oedipus’s horrific downfall and death, with its ensuing civil war.

Richard Jones' new production of Rodelinda for ENO has some very good singing, but suffers from a production that refuses to take the opera seriously.

During the opening night of Anna Nicole at BAM, I found myself experiencing a case of déjà vu. New York City Opera was electrifying the Howard Gilman Opera House with a work by a living composer featuring the salacious story of a female protagonist whose life was splashed across tabloids, and at one point even featuring an act of fellatio with the disjointed music carrying on in the background.

Prom 31 seems to have been loosely based around a royal theme, with two of several nods at this year’s Proms to the Coronation anniversary: explicitly, in the case of William Walton’s Orb and Sceptre march, which he wrote for the 1953 ceremony, and obliquely by way of Edmund Rubbra’s Ode to the Queen, which the BBC commissioned for the Coronation celebrations.

The story of Hansel and Gretel is at least 200 years old – the Brothers Grimm, those avid collectors of German folklore, first published it in 1812. And this well-loved tale’s longevity is something that Garsington Opera’s new production draws attention to from the outset. During the overture, a group of shadowy figures drop pages from a book, which Hansel and Gretel collect with glee.

Welsh National Opera’s contribution to the Wagner bicentenary is in the form of a summer season entitled Wagner Dream, consisting of Jonathan Harvey’s opera of the same name, a run of Madam Butterfly, and Antony McDonald’s new production of Lohengrin. Lothar Koenigs conducted an excellent performance of Wagner’s romantic opera at a packed Wales Millennium Centre.

Keeping up their tradition of mixing contemporary repertoire and new commissions with early music, Fretwork presented an eclectic mix of Purcell Fantasias and a variety of modern works written or arranged for viol consort and soprano in tonight’s concert, part of the RCM’s annual viol festival.

The International Wimbledon Music Festival is only in its fourth year, and yet it has world-class musicians coming to perform in SW19. The standard of music making on this opening night was second to none, and the quality matched that of some of London’s biggest venues.

While there’s no reason that a children’s opera should be simple or easy, there’s no real need for it to be difficult either. So I was a little confused going into the Barbican’s performance of Oliver Knussen’s brilliant brace of Maurice Sendak adaptations this Saturday, which was surrounded, despite the works’ subject matter, with a slightly unbecoming aura of seriousness.

The memory has dimmed somewhat in the past few years. But it remains firmly entrenched in my mind. I wish I could say that this moment was a formative one in my development as musicologist; that destiny took hold of this young boy and led him to the path of his eventual vocation. But no such thing happened.

The Hallé Orchestra, led by Sir Mark Elder, followed their award-winning 2009 Götterdämmerung with a concert performance of Die Walküre over two nights, prefaced by Gerard McBurney’s new work, The Madness of an Extraordinary Plan. With an array of famed soloists, Elder masterminded a triumph, with the magnificent Hallé showing their quality on the concert stage.

Wagner's Die Walküre was split into two concert performances over two days, the first on one evening and the second on an afternoon and an evening. This review is for both. A spot picks out a man in the Bridgewater Hall’s front row, who steps up to stand by a table in front of the Hallé Orchestra, which is ready to begin. He puts on a braided coat to become Richard Wagner.