En direct, Vidéo: Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | Susan Bullock

Carl Nielsen's Maskarade makes a welcome rare appearance, with a great time had by everyone onstage and off.

Conceived for television and first seen on BBC2 in May 1971, Owen Wingrave should lend itself to creative staging and the small screen. Does this new film convince? 

Darkness sits alongside comedy in a new production of Humperdinck's delicious children's opera.

Daniel Kramer’s direction is a model of restraint compared to some of his earlier work for the company.

Jake Heggie's spectacular vocal writing combine with Terence McNally's perfectly paced libretto to provide intense music drama which forces you to confront darkness.

Alex Otterburn as East End Eddy gives a towering performance in Scottish Opera’s revival of its Edinburgh Festival production of Mark Anthony Turnage’s Greek.

Grange Park Opera scored a direct hit with a fine production of Janáček's masterpiece, led by a superb performances from Natalya Romaniw and Susan Bullock as Jenůfa and the Kostelnička.

Opera North's Hansel and Gretel at the Grand Theatre Leeds, directed by Edward Dick, is witty and perceptive, with some insights provide by Freudian psychanalysis

The main problem with Keith Warner's staging is that the director’s dominating focus is on the Jungian ‘Elektra complex’ rather than Elektra the opera.

Keri-Lynn Wilson produces an outstanding UK conducting debut in Richard Jones' faithful production of Puccini's Girl of the Golden West for ENO.

In a world that sees racial hatred and resulting violence across the world, Aldeburgh's stylish production re-establishes the meaning of Owen Wingrave for a new generation, performed by the new generation.

Of the various themes that make up Britten’s Gloriana, written to celebrate the coronation in 1953 and being given a rare outing at Covent Garden to mark the work’s 60th anniversary and Britten’s 100th, the most effective by far is a sort of operatic expansion of Shakespeare’s line “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”.

Monumental in scale and scope, Götterdämmerung is a work to which it is hard to be indifferent. For many, the idea of an evening of fantasy opera lasting nearly seven hours is unimaginable, so uncongenial is the subject material and so great the attention span demanded.

If you've been brought up with the Judaeo-Christian ideal of an all-powerful, all-good God, Norse mythology can come as a bit of a shock. Wotan, the father of the gods, is philandering, deceitful, power-hungry, sentimental, violent and ultimately weak - the gamut of human frailties writ large.

The Last Night of the Proms isn't really a concert: it's more like going to the cast party for the Proms season.

Have you ever been in a chorus of 5,000 people singing the words of an Indian takeaway menu to the tune of Nessun Dorma? Well, courtesy of Kit and the Widow, Susan Bullock and the BBC Comedy Prom, I now have. Of course, the delight of the Proms audience is that not only did everyone know the tune, but a large majority were able to sing it quite competently: it really sounded more than decent.

The Hallé Orchestra, led by Sir Mark Elder, followed their award-winning 2009 Götterdämmerung with a concert performance of Die Walküre over two nights, prefaced by Gerard McBurney’s new work, The Madness of an Extraordinary Plan. With an array of famed soloists, Elder masterminded a triumph, with the magnificent Hallé showing their quality on the concert stage.

Wagner's Die Walküre was split into two concert performances over two days, the first on one evening and the second on an afternoon and an evening. This review is for both. A spot picks out a man in the Bridgewater Hall’s front row, who steps up to stand by a table in front of the Hallé Orchestra, which is ready to begin. He puts on a braided coat to become Richard Wagner.