En direct, Vidéo: Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | Nicholas Folwell

An emotionally intense Violetta from Mané Galoyan in Tom Cairns' darkly challenging La traviata launches Glyndebourne Tour's 50th season

Glass' meditation on Gandhi's principles of non-violent resistance is powerfully treated in Phelim McDermott's virtuosic 2007 staging.

Jonathan Miller's production remains a work of brilliance, but poor conducting amongst other things keeps this revival from getting off the ground.

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.

“Honour your masters!” Sachs instructs Walther in the final scene. Wagner's spirit was honoured well as Glyndebourne's festival opened, but did the song contest necessarily crown the right winner?  

Saffron Opera Group's opening salvo bodes exceptionally well for their planned full cycle of concert performances of Wagner's Ring over the next two years. 

Calixto Bieito’s new production of Verdi’s The Force of Destiny for English National Opera is – for him – a tame affair. 

The Chelsea Opera Group give a concert performance of Wagner's early opera Das Liebesverbot conducted by Anthony Negus.

Grange Park’s Samson et Dalila doesn’t hit the bull’s eye, but it’s well worth the visit for a decent all-round staging of an unfamiliar work, an excellent rendering of its sumptuous score and for a thrilling piece of singing by Carl Tanner.

 Despite a stellar Mimì, a disappointing La bohème at Grange Park Opera.

With ENO having been in the news for all the wrong reasons last week,  it needed Richard Jones' The Mastersingers of Nuremberg to be a great production. Lit up by a towering performance by Iain Paterson, it is.

Philip Glass finds a new simplicity in an impressive première production of The Trial from Music Theatre Wales. 

The charm-ometer was cranked firmly to ‘high’ yesterday evening for the opening opera of this year’s Buxton Festival with a performance of The Jacobin, an opera close to Dvořák’s heart. 

Presenting Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in a single evening is audacious enough. To put on a Ring cycle in a week-end, you have to follow this by doing the same with Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, which requires something even more radical. Opéra de Dijon’s director Laurent Joyeux and dramaturg Stephen Sazio set themselves the task of cutting eight hours of music down to five.

Putting on a Ring cycle is normally considered a major undertaking for any opera company. For a mid-sized provincial opera company, the idea of staging the whole cycle in a weekend seems barely short of insane. But that’s what Opéra de Dijon are doing – Das Rheingold and Die Walküre last night, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung tonight, and it just had to be seen.

Every year, Glyndebourne brings an opera from their festival to the BBC Proms and adapts it to the Royal Albert Hall stage. This year they brought their hottest production of the summer, The Marriage of Figaro (directed at Glyndebourne by Michael Grandage and adapted for the Proms by Ian Rutherford), and it was wonderful to see the Albert Hall packed to rafters.

The first lesson I learnt from this evening’s stunning performance by Opera North of Das Rheingold to a completely full Hall One at the Sage is that however much you listen to Wagner's opera, absolutely nothing can prepare you for the physical and emotional impact of seeing a live performance, with the sheer power of the orchestra and the dramatic force of the music.

When Hector Berlioz first read Gérard de Nerval's translation of Goethe's Faust, he was entranced: he could not put the book down and worked it into a suite entitled Eight Scenes from Faust. Nearly twenty years later, he came back to the material and expanded it into a larger work La Damnation de Faust, but he was perhaps uncertain as to exactly what it was he had created.