En direct, Vidéo: Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | Alan Oke

Katie Mitchell wheels out her tired old tropes in The Makropulos Case, redeemed by its musical performances. 

Isabella Bywater directs an evocative new production of Britten’s ghost opera, well performed at the Coliseum. 

Margaret Atwood’s dystopic novel, masterfully adapted for the operatic stage, is strongly performed at ENO and rings even truer today than it did when it was written.

Ivo van Hoves nicht jugendfreie Inszenierung treibt Brechts moralischen Zeigefinger humoristisch (und erfolgreich) auf die Spitze.

Olivia Fuchs gives a powerful staging of Janáček's morality tale of the perils of eternal youth, with an excellent cast, but there are reservations about the title role.

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

Àlex Ollé inszeniert ein alle Sinne überwaltigendes Fest für die Augen.

Antonio Pappano and the Royal Opera Orchestra get the Ring cycle off to a blazing start; unusually, it's Lise Davidsen and the female cast who take the vocal honours.

Tough, thrilling, ambitious and new: The Skating Rink is an exciting new major commission by Garsington, and its world première delivered on every level.

Virtuoso modern stagecraft and a fine cast combine in a very enjoyable, present-day Rake’s Progress.

David Pountney's House of the Dead makes for high entertainment at Welsh National Opera.

Elena Langer's gorgeous and tongue-in-cheek Figaro Gets a Divorce shines in Geneva, despite David Pountney's boxy libretto. 

Simon McBurney's production of The Rake's Progress for Festival d'Aix-en-Provence begins with the equivalent of a blank page – a simple white paper box onto which he pours his inspiration.

At the opera’s great climaxes Suffolk’s famous wood-and-brick building could barely contain it.

There are several things wrong with the new Robert Carsen directed Der Rosenkavalier that just opened at the Met, but the singing is not among them.

An excellent performance of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s The Last Supper receiving its Scottish première, with Roderick Williams and Susan Bickley heading a luxury cast.

Opera North's production of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd, directed by Orpha Phelan, is a tense psychological drama which puts the emphasis on issues of democracy and attitudes to dictatorship. 

Johan Reuter leads an all star cast in a revelatory performance of George Enescu's masterpiece, aided by spectacular La Fura dels Baus staging.

Elena Langer and David Pountney's new WNO opera Figaro Gets a Divorce did not disappoint. Langer's new refreshing score had flair and imagination in a memorable performance.

A successful concert hall Rake's Progress at the Edinburgh International Festival with an impressively strong cast of singers, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Royal Conservatoire Voices under Sir Andrew Davis.

Royal Opera’s first rival of Anna Nicole opens to an enthusiastic student audience. Eva-Maria Westbroek dazzles, but second time round the work seems even more burned by its clumsy libretto.

This is ENO’s third outing for this production of the Philip Glass classic since its debut in 2007 – and no wonder, when it combines an adventurous artistic vision with surefire commercial success in a way that director’s opera so often doesn’t.

Opera North's Death in Venice is another winner for the company in Britten's centenary year, originally directed by Yoshi Oida. Alan Oke is a successful, anguished Aschenbach.

Is it possible for us to feel a shred of sympathy for Lulu, surely one of opera’s most notorious anti-heroines, even when she meets her grizzly demise at the coda of Berg’s eponymous masterwork? I think it speaks volumes about the astonishing quality of soprano Marie Arnet’s performance that my answer to this question after seeing Welsh National Opera’s new production of Lulu is a most definite “n

Revivals of 21st century operas on the stages of major houses are rarer than hens' teeth, so the Royal Opera were making a strong statement when they announced the revival of Harrison Birtwistle's 2008 The Minotaur, with the original director and much of the original cast.

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.

Every opera should have at least one of those “wow” moments that lift you out of your seat and have you singing them in your head on the way home.

Every year, Glyndebourne brings an opera from their festival to the BBC Proms and adapts it to the Royal Albert Hall stage. This year they brought their hottest production of the summer, The Marriage of Figaro (directed at Glyndebourne by Michael Grandage and adapted for the Proms by Ian Rutherford), and it was wonderful to see the Albert Hall packed to rafters.

Sir George Dyson (1883–1964) is now principally remembered by the generations of grown-up schoolchildren who sang his many songs for educational use, and more recently by church choirs and congregations for his religious music.

Originally penned by Joseph Conrad in 1903, Heart of Darkness deals with the deepest, most dangerous misunderstandings between human beings. Set during the era of imperialism, ship’s captain Charlie Marlow relates to his London dockyard comrades a disconcerting tale of a journey to the heart of an African jungle.

Murder. Suicide. Grand larceny. Puccini's triptych of short operas, two tragedies followed by a riotous farce, always makes for an evening of variety, with the potential for many snatches of greatness.

This was a recreation of a Proms concert that Benjamin Britten conducted in 1963, but with a contemporary twist.

In a promotional video for Opera North's new production of From The House of the Dead, director John Fulljames gives us two seemingly opposing views on Leoš Janáček's final opera- that it is “the most intense opera of the twentieth century,” but also a piece in which “very little happens.

In case you've somehow missed the hype, Anna Nicole is the Royal Opera's newly commissioned opera about the life of Anna Nicole Smith, a girl from Texas who married an elderly billionnaire, became a model and celebrity sex symbol who received gigantic media exposure, and died of a drug overdose a few months after the death of her son.