Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Les Contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann)

Selectively unearthed from current critical editions, this fabulously performed new Hoffmann plumbs the murky depths of its antihero’s psyche.

Bartlett Sher's production of The Tales of Hoffmann, revived at The Met, takes a Kafka-esque, surreal view of the opera.

Offenbach's vivid setting of E.T.A. Hoffmann's fantastic tales gets an enjoyable outing, with Spyres, Testé and Pudova the undoubted stars of the show.

Los Angeles Opera's Tales of Hoffmann survives multiple cast changes to look and sound fabulous, but it drags dramatically.

When an enormous black gondola creaks and shudders its way across the stage in the “Giulietta' act of the Royal Opera's Tales of Hoffmann, it acts as a metaphor for John Schlesinger's venerable production.

Hoffmann goes Steampunk: Renaud Doucet’s staging for the Volksoper is the exception to the sensible rule that “less is more”.

Barrie Kosky, with nods to the surreal and the macabre, plunges us headlong into Hoffmann’s nightmarish world in a terrific new production at the Komische Oper.

Great singing and acting from the Met's Tales of Hoffmann second cast. 

The Metropolitan Opera’s five-year old production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann returned to the repertoire with a remarkable undertaking of the title role by Vittorio Grigolo.

Calixto Bieito's production of Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann is astoundingly sung, but suffers from excessive cuts and occasionally odd direction.

With this mesmerising version of Les contes d'Hoffmann, Marthaler has proved (as Offenbach did more than one century ago) that it is possible to love Romanticism through its satire. 

Calixto Bieito's The Tales of Hoffmann at the Norwegian National Opera contains some very effective and at times striking moments, but the production turned out something of a disappointment overall.

The return of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann to the stage of San Francisco Opera on Wednesday night was a welcome and long overdue event.

Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann is a fine example of how the ridiculous can indeed be sublime. Three E.T.A. Hoffmann stories about otherworldly love affairs with defective femmes fatales, one of whom turns out to be a mechanical doll, connected only by the author’s gullible alter-ego as protagonist, scale the heights of the phantasmagorical.

The venerable Viennese tradition of airing dirty operatic laundry in public found an unlikely proponent this season in the form of the Theater an der Wien’s mild-mannered director Roland Geyer, who, unhappy with William Friedkin’s production of The Tales of Hoffmann in March, abruptly sacked the American director and announced he would devise a new staging himself a matter of months before the

Director William Friedkin doesn’t put a dramaturgical foot wrong in his Theater an der Wien production of The Tales of Hoffmann and yet doesn’t challenge, or even engage with, any of the opera’s Romantic positions.

Sir, Madam, do you like your opera quirky? A singing mechanical doll? A giant shaving mirror? The Evil Eye itself in a piano? Then welcome to the inebriated, fantastical, phantasmagorical world of E.T.A. Hoffmann, brought to you by Mr. Richard Jones with a delightful musical accompaniment by M. Jacques Offenbach.

Tucked away on Spruce Street, Philadelphia, many blocks off the glittering Avenue of the Arts is a stellar training academy with the mission of preparing world-class opera singers. It’s called the Academy of Vocal Arts (AVA), and it offers resident artists from throughout the United States and all over the world a chance to study and perform in its four-year program.

One of the questions this opera poses for any director is how to link the 'tales' of Hoffmann's three lost loves together and knit them satisfactorily into the Prologue and Epilogue.

A split-level stage featuring an ornate stairwell and scaffolding was the setting for this the tenth Jette Parker Young Artists’ Summer Performance. Entitled ‘Veneziana’, the specially compiled programme embodied the visions of Venice dreamt by Rossini, Donizetti, Britten and Offenbach in six sets of Opera Scenes.

Those who like their opera off-kilter will revel in the Metropolitan Opera’s Les Contes d'Hoffmann, an opera in three acts (with prologue and epilogue) by Jacques Offenbach. The Met production was heavily operetta à la Offenbach—risqué, and at times, erotic.

We spent last night in Zurich, where we had the chance to see the Zurich Opernhaus production of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann. It’s the first time I’ve been to the opera house here and the first time I’ve seen Offenbach on stage, so interesting on both counts. The opera house is “small but perfectly formed”, as the cliché goes.

Pour apprécier ces Contes d’Hoffmann à leur juste valeur, il faut accepter d’oublier tout – ou presque – ce que l’on en connaît.

Ce que Robert Carsen nous donne à voir à travers cette vertigineuse mise en abyme, c’est le théâtre de l’âme humaine en quête d’accomplissement.

Rolando Villazón bricht nach einer schwachen Leistung seine Vorstellung ab und übergibt an Arturo Chacón-Cruz. Dass die Aufführung an der Münchener Staatsoper dennoch gelingt, liegt vor allem an der einfallsreichen Inszenierung.