En direct, Vidéo: Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | Michael Rosewell

It premiered in the same year as Mozart's opera, but Gazzaniga's Don Giovanni is virtually unknown. Despite the best efforts of an energetic student cast it doesn't come close to hitting the heights that Mozart and Da Ponte reached.

An opportunity to hear one of Respighi's operas in the UK is a real treat; the composer's take on Sleeping Beauty, La bella dormente nel bosco, is an ideal companion to to Ravel's  L'Enfant et les sortilèges in a terrific double bill at the Royal College of Music.

A new production of Humperdinck's charming fairy-tale opera is always to be welcomed, particularly when performed with such enthusiasm by the students of the Royal College of Music.

A delicious evening which showed off its young talent to best advantage and made us want more Offenbach.

Two contemporary operas give us darkness and death in riveting, inexorable performances. 

Timothy Edlin was a superb ass, first among six equals, in Liam Steel's production. 

A great return appearance for English Touring Opera's Puccini double bill opening its spring tour at the Hackney Empire.

The Royal College of Music's first opera of the season, The Cunning Little Vixen has some excellent singing and first-class playing from the student orchestra.

Stephen Unwin's straight direction and some talented young singers from the Royal Academy of Music Opera school made these two works a real treat. 

Blanche McIntyre's new production for ETO proves a disappointment, saddled with a trip hazard of a set. 

Wonderful singing and playing liven up a slightly lifeless staging of Mozart's turbulent masterpiece. 

An energetic performance of Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus, showcased both the work and some very fine young singers.

The laughs keep on coming in Liam Steel's glorious 1950s Albert Herring in an English village where pretensions rise as morals decay, while Nick Pritchard shines as our modest eponymous hero.

James Conway’s production of La bohème may be a little restrained on banter, but hits all the emotional high notes, is compellingly played and superbly sung. 

It may not be perfect, but this rare chance to see Rossini's La gazzetta should not be missed, in a glitteringly elaborate production with a talented young cast, great choreography and even a pantomime camel...

English Touring Opera's production of Mozart's The Magic Flute launches in Hackney, balanced more towards fun than profundity, with some stunning coups de théâtre.

English Touring Opera take Tippett’s powerful pacifist retelling of Homer’s Iliad on tour in a strong, beautifully designed production, directed by James Conway, which will leave hearts and minds in turmoil.

When the Baroque movement in art ended, the backlash was severe. The very adjective became an insult: the cold, clear, rarefied eye of 18th-century Neoclassicism found its opulence stifling, its luxury oppressive, and its profusion of ornament, ugly.

English Touring Opera’s Verdi title for their Spring season in this composer’s (and Wagner’s) anniversary year is one of no small ambition. Premièred to only modest success in Venice in 1857, it would take Verdi another 20 or so years to return to Simon Boccanegra to try to fix the old “wobbly table” (as he and his librettist, Boito, later dubbed the 1857 version).

“I apologise to those who anticipated togas, or 17th-century Venice”, writes James Conway in the programme notes to his production of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea, currently running at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre in London.

“Community, exclusion, rejection and desire”, writes director Christopher Rolls about English Touring Opera’s production of Albert Herring. “Doesn’t sound like a recipe for an uproarious comedy does it? And the key thing about Herring is that it is very very funny.

Eugene Onegin is one of the greatest of all operas, both musically and dramatically: Tchaikovsky's temperament and compositional proclivities find in the libretto the perfect characters and subject matter such that his particular genius is allowed to flourish and bloom, more fully and voluptuously than he ever managed before or after in the genre of opera.

When one sets off to the opera to attend what is usually called a ‘double bill’, one will, most of the time, expect to see two operas clearly contrasting in character. More unusual is to find two extremely different works, hardly sharing anything between themselves, presented in a reading that digs deep for any possible echoes.

The Royal College of Music’s International Opera School has long been a training ground for some of the world’s most famous opera stars.

If anyone tells you that all opera is highbrow, Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld provides you with a perfect example of the opposite. It's coarse, raunchy, fast, fun, and continually pokes fun at the conventions of grand opera.