Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Hackney Empire

Eloise Lally shifts the Romeo and Juliet love story into New York mafia families. Jessica Cale and Samantha Price provide blissful bel canto as the star-crossed lovers.

Olivia Fuchs' production of Rimsky-Korsakov's charming fable for ETO begins its tour in Hackney and is worth travelling to see. Catch this thoughtful production in a town near you.

Jude Christian's indulgent reinvention of Puccini's opera does not serve English Touring Opera well as it embarks on its spring tour. 

A Rossini comedy should sparkle, but this new production, starting its tour from Hackney, is decidedly lacking bubbles.

Donizetti’s tale of one the Italian Renaissance’s objects of hate is well sung and superbly acted in ETO's new spring tour production.

A fine cast breathes life into the story of the captured Ottoman Sultan Bajazet and his Mongol conqueror.

A revival of James Conway's staging of Ottone launches English Touring Opera's autumn season of three Handel operas. 

Using Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick's distillations of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, the company concluded its miniature Ring cycle in under five hours, without sacrificing musical or dramatic tension.

Rimsky-Korsakov's anti-tsarist satirical fairytale makes for an entertaining rarity in ETO's spring tour.

English Touring Opera has revived James Conway's production of La bohème to launch the company back to full operations post-lockdown. What this new run lacks in finesse is made up for in bags of heart and spirit.

It sizzles with energy, fizzes with musical delight and rejoices in an understated sense of fun. Conway gives the work’s incongruities free rein and defies the audience not to chuckle.

Wagnerites can get their fix in London this week, where Die Walküre opens the Grimeborn Festival in Julia Burbach's new production of the adaptation by Graham Vick and Jonathan Dove. 

James Conway's production for English Touring Opera returns in a trimmed-down, single-evening guise. 

It is clear that these women are already ripe for plucking even before Don Alfonso unleashes his dastardly plan.

Weill's satirical fairytale bites just as hard today as it did in 1933.

English Touring Opera open their autumn season with the first of two Singspiels. 

A fine cast, orchestra and production make English Touring Opera's new production of Verdi's Macbeth a must see. 

A direct and expressive new production of one of Mozart's most adventurous operas enthrals at the Hackney Empire. 

Rossini's Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra is a hard work to love and English Touring Opera's new production which launched at the Hackney Empire Theatre struggled to make a case for regular outings.

English Touring Opera’s new Radamisto took time to settle down on opening night.

A great return appearance for English Touring Opera's Puccini double bill opening its spring tour at the Hackney Empire.

ETO's extracts from Rossini's serious operas at the Hackney Empire lacked spark and dynamism, but saw a fine showing from Elena Xanthoudakis and Catherine Carby.

Conway's decision to render Handel's epic in its entirety was let down by a static staging and unnecessary repeats that masked the hidden gem-like arias.

A searing examination of love in a time war is to be found in a new production and new edition of Rameau's greatest work.

A double bill of operas that were literally made for each other, Péter Eötvös wrote his one act masterpiece Senza sangue in 2015 to act as a partner piece for Bartók's Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.

Lawrence Brownlee gives a compelling performance that truly does the groundbreaking saxophonist justice. 

Blanche McIntyre's new production for ETO proves a disappointment, saddled with a trip hazard of a set. 

“Folies Bergère does Greek gods” is how director Martin Duncan describes Offenbach's Orphée aux enfers, and his production for Royal Academy Opera is enormous fun. 

This visiting production by Róbert Alföldi set in a psychiatric unit is sensational; thought-provoking, moving and with a very fine cast.

Clever staging and a high standard of acting does much to happily while away the three hours of this baroque opera in the second of ETO's Baroque extravaganza.

Updating 470BC Abydos to a 1940s RAF base complete with tin hangar and outdoor privy seemed at times more Dad’s Army than a particularly cohesive tale of war and love.

Wonderful singing and playing liven up a slightly lifeless staging of Mozart's turbulent masterpiece. 

Donizetti's back catalogue proves just as rich as his well-loved works, with this blisteringly good foray into an extraordinary opera whose UK premiere is 179 undeserved years late. 

A polished production of The Marriage of Figaro from some of the potential opera stars of the future.

James Conway’s production of La bohème may be a little restrained on banter, but hits all the emotional high notes, is compellingly played and superbly sung. 

Donizetti’s Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo hasn’t strayed onto UK shores for decades, but is given a spirited performance by English Touring Opera. 

Written half a century before the verismo movement, Donizetti paints a true-to-life portrait of a besieged people which is genuinely touching. James Conway's straightforward production features some notable individual singers and an excellent performance by the chorus.

Few composers deal in genial wit better than Joseph Haydn, so it was baffling that his opera buffa Il mondo della luna left me so grumpy in this English Touring Opera production. 

English Touring Opera's production of Mozart's The Magic Flute launches in Hackney, balanced more towards fun than profundity, with some stunning coups de théâtre.

A very concise, two-act opera which tells a bleak wartime tale of sacrifice, rarely performed and never realised to the satisfaction of its own composer. You could be forgiven for thinking I was describing something from 20th-century Germany, perhaps an expressionist work taking after Berg’s Wozzeck or similar. You’d be wrong.

English Touring Opera’s Verdi title for their Spring season in this composer’s (and Wagner’s) anniversary year is one of no small ambition. Premièred to only modest success in Venice in 1857, it would take Verdi another 20 or so years to return to Simon Boccanegra to try to fix the old “wobbly table” (as he and his librettist, Boito, later dubbed the 1857 version).

Mozart’s Così fan tutte is a comic opera filled with deceit, disguises and betrayal, all carried along by a breathtaking score and witty lyrics. What better way to start ETO’s Spring 2013 season than with a new rendering of this timeless work, in a brilliantly clever English translation by Martin Fitzpatrick.

Sometimes you’re presented with the opportunity to witness something wonderful, something you wouldn’t have even known existed except by an uncanny twist of fate. So I found myself queuing outside Hackney Empire to experience Shadowball, Julian Joseph’s community jazz opera about baseball.

Eugene Onegin is one of the greatest of all operas, both musically and dramatically: Tchaikovsky's temperament and compositional proclivities find in the libretto the perfect characters and subject matter such that his particular genius is allowed to flourish and bloom, more fully and voluptuously than he ever managed before or after in the genre of opera.

The Barber of Seville and Eugene Onegin, the two operas being toured by English Touring Opera this season, share two things: they are both highly melodic stalwarts of the repertoire, and their plots both revolve around the writing of love letters.

Cool venue – cool ensemble – cool concert! The Kronos quartet are successful where so many fail in bringing the often-too-distinct worlds of pop/rock and classical together. This concert highlighted their commitment to forging their own performance aesthetic by only programming music that has been written specifically for them.