En direct, Vidéo: Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | Robert Howarth

Olivia Fuchs directs Monteverdi's early opera in a sparse staging with a consistently fine cast. 

Some exceptional singing intermittently enlivens Daniel Slater's production which, dramatically and emotionally, takes time to ignite.   

Corelli and a triple-decker sandwich on the south coast, with three arias from Handel’s Messiah separated by two concertos from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Sinister aspects are stressed in Mozart's The Magic Flute at Leeds Grand Theatre directed by James Brining and conducted by Robert Howarth.

A resounding success at its 1709 première, Handel’s Agrippina gripped the ear and dazzled the eye at the Grange Festival in a hugely entertaining and powerful performance.

Sublime orchestral playing and stellar soloists don't quite make up for a lacklustre performance by the Academy's choir in Monteverdi's moving work

Music written by Bach for the Collegium Musicum, and also for the first Sunday after Easter, was played with skill and flourish by this exceptional orchestra;  sadly, the singing was not consistently good enough to match. 

Seeing Zürich Opera’s new production of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria made me wonder why this is the least performed of Monteverdi's three surviving operas. 

When one thinks of Haydn, opera really isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. It’s the symphonies, the string quartets, even his oratorios you think of first, not his operas. And yet he wrote 15 of them. L’isola disabitata is the eleventh of the bunch, written for the Eszterházy court in 1779, and it was this opera The Norwegian Opera and Ballet (DNO) chose as their 2012/2013 season opener.

The Roman emperor Julius Caesar’s entanglement with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra is one of the best-known love stories of all time, and the operatic re-telling by George Frideric Handel, with its incredible music and universal themes of war, passion and politics, is experiencing a resurgence.