En direct, Vidéo: Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | Paula Sides

Paula Sides as Donna Anna has an appealing sound throughout her range, a hint of spinto power, and gave the vocal performance of the night.

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

Jeff Clarke's characteristically high-octane style seems made for the sarcastic, hyperactive existential madness that is Candide in this little gem of a production for Iford. 

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

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.

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.

Agrippina was a force to be reckoned with: the granddaughter, sister, niece, wife and mother of four Roman Emperors (and lover, incestuously, of at least two). As Mary Beard points out in her brilliant programme introduction, “Agrippina was probably the best connected woman that the Roman world ever saw” – and one of the most ruthless.

When the Baroque movement in art ended, the backlash was severe. The very adjective became an insult: the cold, clear, rarefied eye of 18th-century Neoclassicism found its opulence stifling, its luxury oppressive, and its profusion of ornament, ugly.

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.

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.

When Emperor Überall decrees an all-pervasive war that will result in the death of his whole population, Death takes umbrage at the fact that his job is being usurped and, in the mother of all demarcation disputes, goes on strike.