En direct, Vidéo: Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | Claire Booth

Martyn Brabbins and Claire Booth are among the Nash Ensemble's regular collaborators celebrating the group’s 60th Anniversary, marked by four world premieres.

A  midsummer night but no moonshine for this madness in the Britten Studio. 

Fine performances from Claire Booth and Nash Ensemble conjure up the dramatic landscapes of Andalusia, the Hebrides and the wilds of southern Wisconsin, as portrayed by Harrison Birtwistle and Simon Holt. 

Director Adele Thomas can do no wrong, sustaining her extraordinary run of fizz with this unlikely concatenation of four Handel cantatas at Stone Nest.

In its Royal Opera House debut, Irish National Opera's high-energy Bajazet provides a great evening for Baroque fans and sceptics alike.

El Nash Ensemble ofreció un gran concierto desde el Wigmore Hall con obras contemporáneas entre las que se contaban tres estrenos mundiales.

Visual eye candy, excellent singing and superb Handelian playing by Laurence Cummings and the London Handel Orchestra are marred by poor diction and limited acting expressivity.

Mark-Anthony Turnage's First World War opera both moves and dazzles at the Barbican.

Italian swagger and French farce combining to raise some much needed laughs despite the restrictions of a concert performance at Cadogan Hall.

Welsh National Opera's new production of The Barber of Seville disappoints in an uncoordinated performance in Bristol. 

“the moon has set... I lie alone.” A deeply absorbing new production to the music of Georg Friedrich Haas in the Linbury Studio.

Forward-looking programme celebrates contemporary repertoire, with two world premières in a concert of works written within the last 35 years.

A colour-coded Mosè in Egitto uses the paintings of Marc Chagall to inspire the costumes for the Jews and the Egyptians in this production of a Rossinian rarity.

Oliver Knussen, the RSNO and Edinburgh Festival Chorus offer rarely heard titanic works in a packed Usher Hall.

A suitably rustic account of Janáček’s tale: seductive, engaging, and with a sense of intimacy ideal for this small venue.

Miraculous as Jonathan Harvey’s music is, it seems reductive to call Wagner Dream an opera. Half the cast, after all, don’t even sing, but act: it’s a sincere meeting of music and theatre in a way that opera usually isn’t.

This Richard Thomas Foundation concert at Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room introduced us to two completely new works, and presented two slightly older pieces too for good measure. All were beautifully played by a top selection of performers, making for an excellent demonstration of the power of new music.

Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival has a number of strands of thought permeating its concerts. It explores the effects of war, sex and sexuality, politics, and race on some of the 20th century’s most important musical output.

“The moonlit night dazzled us. Birds shrieked in the trees. There was a rush of wind in the fields. We crawled through the dust, a pair of snakes.”Maybe the pair of snakes is Franz Kafka, the author, and György Kurtág, the composer who set this short passage (along with 39 others by Kafka) to music.

While there’s no reason that a children’s opera should be simple or easy, there’s no real need for it to be difficult either. So I was a little confused going into the Barbican’s performance of Oliver Knussen’s brilliant brace of Maurice Sendak adaptations this Saturday, which was surrounded, despite the works’ subject matter, with a slightly unbecoming aura of seriousness.

The memory has dimmed somewhat in the past few years. But it remains firmly entrenched in my mind. I wish I could say that this moment was a formative one in my development as musicologist; that destiny took hold of this young boy and led him to the path of his eventual vocation. But no such thing happened.

In days gone by, if you went to see a Mahler Symphony, you wouldn't feel you’d had the full experience unless Gustav himself was waving the baton. Nowadays the privilege of watching a composer conduct his own work is a somewhat rarer one, though fortunately not yet a completely extinct practice, and watching Knussen’s Symphony No.

Oliver Knussen has taken the BBC Symphony Orchestra on some interesting journeys during his relationship with them, as both composer and conductor. Of all these journeys, Prom 19 surely ranks among the most fascinating. Under Knussen’s masterful conducting, the orchestra and Claire Booth gave us a scintillating if sometimes overwhelming exhibition of six intense early Twentieth Century works.

The Holland Festival boasts quite an impressive relationship with Britten and his works. Tonight’s chamber opera, The Rape of Lucretia was first performed at the festival in 1947 with Britten, Peter Pears and Kathleen Ferrier (for whom the opera was written) and the English Opera Group. Tonight’s performance with Oliver Knussen at the helm is another proud continuation of this tradition.