En direct, Vidéo: Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | Emma Bell

Following her Billy Budd and Peter Grimes, Deborah Warner directs a third Britten opera at the Teatro Costanzi. 

Sacred and secular, operatic and symphonic dimensions united in a thrilling climax to the London Philharmonic Orchestra's season. 

Who wouldn't relish the chance of seeing a Ring cycle at close quarters? Longborough's Die Walküre isn't perfect, but it consistently delivers on the story and on character interpretation.

Ann Yee and Natalie Abrahami give Rusalka an ecological reading, but it's the musical side of things that really takes flight in The Royal Opera's new production.

Finally reaching the stage of the Venetian theatre, Benjamin Britten's first major opera meets with success thanks to Juraj Valčuha's conducting, Paul Curran's staging and an excellent cast.

 Poul Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale comes home to English National Opera after 20 years in a powerful new production by Annilese Miskimmon.

Breastplates are back in vogue, but comedy horses and cheap production values undermine the first chapter in English National Opera's new Ring cycle. 

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment gets to strut its stuff on the Glyndebourne stage in a concert of Brahms and Beethoven. 

The performance was technically flawless, but left our reviewer unmoved.

Herrlich expressiv füllt Daniel Harding den Raum mit Klang, der einen direkt in der Magengrube trifft.

The Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, with their Dutch-Maltese conductor Lawrence Renes and the British soprano Emma Bell, embrace the cause of Wagner and Bruckner in the heart of the Mediterranean.

The music’s explosions of volume have an open-throated magnificence.

Brilliant staging, superb acting, a magnetic performance from Virginie Verrez and an excellent orchestral performance make a strong case for Samuel Barber's all-but-forgotten chiller.

The production was interesting but at times distracting, but the musical performances triumphed. 

In a temporary home, Cologne Opera have mounted a remarkably joyful production of Beethoven’s single, wonderful opera.

The Hallé's oddly-ordered Ring arrives at the beginning with Das Rheingold.

Tim Albery's 2010 production of Tannhäuser, receiving its first revival at Covent Garden, begins with a stylish opening 20 minutes, but thereafter things become rather bland. 

Claus Guth gives the Staatsoper Berlin a Turn of the Screw unlike any other.

Robert Carsen’s production is an exercise in extreme minimalism. Dialogues des Carmélites is a great opera, and this production touches greatness without quite grasping it in both hands. 

A supremely entertaining and highly descriptive Symphonie fantastique from Lothar Koenigs and the Welsh National Opera Orchestra.

In his production of Fidelio for English National Opera, director Calixto Bieito sets out to completely contradict the work’s central tenet.

Welsh National Opera’s contribution to the Wagner bicentenary is in the form of a summer season entitled Wagner Dream, consisting of Jonathan Harvey’s opera of the same name, a run of Madam Butterfly, and Antony McDonald’s new production of Lohengrin. Lothar Koenigs conducted an excellent performance of Wagner’s romantic opera at a packed Wales Millennium Centre.

Few things could unite such a large group of people as the Hallé’s Meistersinger did tonight. Some 515 performers, drawn from three orchestras and five choirs, gathered to present highlights from the first two acts of Wagner’s opera and the third act in full.

Don Giovanni is perhaps the most difficult of the Mozart–Da Ponte opera trilogy to stage. Not only is there the problem of how exactly the Don is to be consumed in flames at the end of its three-hour span, or the issue of how to make the statue of the Commendatore come to life.

If I were to describe Janáček's late opera The Cunning Little Vixen as a bit of a one-off, I could be accused of severe understatement. It's the only opera in the mainstream repertoire to be based on a cartoon strip, it mixes animals and humans at will and it incorporates dance and mime routines, all against the backdrop of the setting of ancient forest so beloved by middle European romantics.

There’s usually plenty of hype surrounding a newly written opera performed at Covent Garden, but the carefully placed stories about Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune are on the improbable end of the scale, featuring a flying kebab shop and a team of breakdancers. So I arrived at Miss Fortune without any real idea of what I was going to get.

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.

The concept of freedom is at the heart of Opera North's current production of Fidelio. As soon as you open your programme, you are encouraged by the company's General Director Richard Mantle to consider Beethoven's only opera as having something to say about the struggle for liberty that has been taking place in the Middle East over the past few months.

For the third of their major operas this season, the English National Opera chose Mozart's Idomeneo, one of Mozart's earlier masterpieces telling the story of the Cretan King Idomeneus's homecoming after the Trojan War.