Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | String Quartet in E minor

A high-spirited programme in Tivoli Vredenburg that struck just the right note of hope and renewal as the classical music scene across Europe reawakens.

An evening of three Italian opera composers on the concert platform, crowned with a glowing performance of Puccini's rarely heard Messa di Gloria.

One of the pleasures of live music-making is seeing as well as hearing: one gets a sense of a performance as a multi-layered communicative act rather than solely as a sequence of beautiful sounds. In Saturday evening’s ACO concert with the extraordinary cellist Giovanni Sollima as soloist, the visual dimension contributed more than usual to the effect of the whole. 

Donizetti's darkly comic one act opera Rita is the first fully staged opera presented by San Francisco's New Century Chamber Ensemble. 

No surprise to find a Verdi programme at the Proms in his bicentenary year, but what was unusual was the focus on sacred music, given his antipathy towards the church as demonstrated in his more prolific output, his operas.