En direct, A la demande, En streaming: Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | Toby Spence

Si la direction quelque peu verticale de Lawrence Renes ne convainc pas totalement, les musiciens de l'ONL ont livré une admirable performance musicale dans un programme entièrement vingtiémiste.

Charles Dutoit à la tête de l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande et de la Zürcher Sing-Akademie aura illuminé les noirceurs du « War Requiem » de Britten d’un art abouti des transitions et des ambiances. Portés par sa baguette, les artistes sur la scène du Victoria Hall auront permis un voyage serein dans des terres qui pourtant regorgent de chausse-trappes. 

Entre l'imaginaire de Pedro Calderon, celui de Lewis Caroll ou encore de Jonathan Swift, cette nouvelle production signée Stefan Herheim invite à la réflexion sur la frontière entre folie et sommeil, illusion et réalité, amour et raison.

Spano marshaled the vast forces with sensitive balance in many moments. But the difficulty of achieving a proper blend amidst the thick timbral texture prevented the performance from reaching transcendence.

A surprise "artist" gatecrashes the Festival's closing concert

After nearly two decades away from the Covent Garden stage, it was time Britten's Billy Budd came home, in a new production from Madrid by Deborah Warner. 

The 20th century completely passed Parry's Judith by completely... and it isn't difficult to see why.

Toby Spence, Matthew Rose and Andrew Watts shine in a fluent semi-staging at the Royal Festival Hall.

Julius Drake’s torrential postlude capped an evening in which he had been superb throughout.

Glistening performances by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and combined forces under Thomas Adès bring to life Stravinsky’s Perséphone, with fiery premières of works by Adès himself and Gerald Barry.

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

Affecting Britten, distinctive Elias and popular Elgar, with a curio of arranged Purcell thrown in, from Ryan Wigglesworth and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

A visually stunning production with a fine cast to match. 

Billy Budd triumphs in Madrid thanks to an inspired orchestra, a solid cast and a dream team of stage magicians.

The silence of the Cenotaph was swept away by the greatest howl of anguish in music.

Purists look away. Translating Müller’s poetry from its sublime German to work well in English was always going to be a difficult task, but Spence’s infectious enthusiasm carried it off.

Houston Symphony’s Creation was not pristine, but it caught the emotion overall so well that perhaps the out-of-place details don’t matter.

Spence sounds confident in an evening of Tippett and Britten at Snape, culminating in a spinetingling account of John Donne's Holy Sonnet X. 

Mozart's messy monster of an opera gets a brutalist tidy-up at Garsington, but the determinedly straightforward reading only makes this work's innate problems more obvious. 

“If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it.” There was certainly plenty of Shakespeare-inspired music on the bill for the London Philharmonic Orchestra's celebration of The Bard. 

The Met's brought back its Die Fledermaus set in the turn-of-the-century Vienna in a glittering production with a winning ensemble of singers.

Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic present Elgar's Dream of Gerontius as a well crafted gem of  the English choral tradition, but fall short of a dramatic outpouring of human emotion and religious fervour.

This was, by no doubt, the largest ensemble on stage at Colston Hall this season with five choirs and an orchestra that took over the stage. 

Toby Spence and Sarah Connolly make splendid soulful companions and conductor Peter Oundjian brings a resonant depth to Elgar's period-piece in a fine end to the RSNO's season.

With its latest incarnation of Die Zauberflöte, the Royal Opera ticks all the boxes in a strongly cast revival. 

Excellent singing and a stunning debut win out over relentlessly clever visual effects.

Ehe, Scheidung, Germany's next Topmodel und großartige Stimmen - diese Münchner Inszenierung verspricht einen spannenden Abend.

An unrepeatable performance of Britten's profound choral masterpiece, the War Requiem, conducted by Andris Nelsons at the Proms.

Die Fledermaus is as quintessentially Viennese as zithers and Schnitzel. In John Wilson, the Philharmonia and a fine ensemble cast, we should have had all the ingredients for a memorable matinée performance, but a few elements meant the fizz went rather flat.

My mother always told me not to sit too close in the theatre, and after seeing this revival of Martin Kusej’s modern realization of Stravinksy’s The Rake’s Progress at the Theater an der Wien, I think I know what she was talking about.Act I begins innocuously enough in a sparse apartment, unfurnished apart from a mattress and a television.

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Royal Philharmonic Society, and supporting their ethos of “music for all”, Prom 38 was completely free.

The newly built and unconventionally imposing Coventry Cathedral, built next to the ruins of the original medieval building destroyed in the Second World War, played host to the first performance of Britten’s War Requiem in 1962.

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”.

The Salle Pleyel’s programmatic dichotomy between “memory” and “creation” continually seeks to promote the more established names in classical music, whilst also shedding light on lesser-known repertoires from all musical epochs.

It’s pretty luxurious to be able to stumble out of your front door at ten to six, wander five minutes round the corner to your friendly local cinema, be greeted with a glass of sparkling wine, and then watch a high-definition live screening of a top contemporary opera production at the Met.

Read our review of Robert Lepage's production of The Tempest in its 2012 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.

It’s been a busy couple of months for Berlioz’s Requiem in London. First there was Sir Colin Davis’s June performance at St. Paul’s, with the reinforced London Symphony Orchestra’s brass bands arrayed around the dome. Now, on an unofficial Big Choral Weekend at the Proms there was this valedictory effort from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and their outgoing music director, Thierry Fischer.

The late-night Proms usually offer something very different from the regular programme, be it chamber music, jazz, or choral music. Thursday evening’s Prom was no exception to this, featuring the music of the somewhat forgotten Ivor Novello, sometimes considered the Andrew Lloyd Webber of the early 20th Century.

Before the concert began, Yannick Nézet-Séguin gave a short introductory speech that, in effect, would have the Royal Festival Hall consecrated for the evening as a place of worship.

Thomas Adès' music has a rawness that only comes across heard live. This seems particularly true when he conducts it himself. Gone are the smooth contours of recordings and other conductors, replaced by a focus on infectious rhythm and sometimes brutal colours. His lyrical tendencies therefore become all the more powerful.Tevot is the perfect example.

The classical world came off lightly in the recent New Year Honours list, with the Royal Opera House’s knighted Antonio Pappano the only winner. He has much to celebrate, more so after directing last night’s concert performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg with authoritative ease and good cheer, supported by a fine array of soloists.

Young man spurns the love of a good woman. Time passes. Man realises the error of his ways, but it is too late. It's not exactly the most taxing of plot lines, but in Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin turned it into a masterpiece.

It is always exciting to witness the birth of a new piece of composition, all the more so when the soloist is the inimitable Yo-Yo Ma.

Perhaps visions of the royal princes in battle dress influenced last night’s programme. Or perhaps it was merely felt that Beethoven’s Eroica symphony requires a suitably epic companion. Either way, the result was a rare performance of Britten’s enormous Battle of Heroes, written to honour the members of the International Brigade who died in the Spanish Civil war.

“Off with their heads!” I vividly recall being terrorized as a preschooler hearing Walt Disney’s sadistic, loud-mouthed Queen of Hearts thunder these signature lines. I have since learned that decapitation as capital punishment is not exclusive to the fictional Queen of Hearts of Lewis Carroll and Walt Disney, but rather grim historical reality.

For a long period, Charles Gounod's Faust was one of the most frequently performed operas, its popularity due to a lusciously romantic score which contains a series of showstopping set-piece arias, many of which have found their way into popular culture (to give just one example, the Jewel Song in Act III has a starring role in the Tintin story The Castafiore Emerald).

Read our review of Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leise's production of Ambroise Thomas­'s Hamlet in its 2010 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.