En direct, Vidéo: Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | Peter Savidge

Natalya Romaniw is a natural as our maligned heroine: Paul Curran creates staging of bewildering comic complexity and pulls it off with panache.

A daring double bill from Opera North and Phoenix Dance Theatre pairs Jeanguy Saintus' new choreography for The Rite of Spring with a revival of Christopher Alden's production of Gianni Schicchi. 

Emily Howard's new opera, an Aldeburgh Festival commission, takes an ambitiously modernist approach to a dystopian story of loneliness: a tough, but thought-provoking work. 

A convincing revival for Opera North's Madama Butterfly at Leeds Grand Theatre directed by Tim Albery and conducted by Martin Pickard.

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

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. 

Tragedy giving way to comedy – a recipe which still works, as demonstrated in Opera North's fine double bill of Gianni Schicchi and La vida breve.

Smetana's The Bartered Bride by Opera North at Leeds Grand Theatre directed by Daniel Slater is a confident revival of an old success. 

Opera North's La traviata at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, makes an excellent start to Opera North's new season.

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.

Sometimes in a performance there is a moment when everything just comes together; when every element on stage is operating at such a high level that the performance transcends these elements and causes one to become so immersed in the proceedings that you forget you’re at a performance at all.

When Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala in 1904, it was heavily booed. Few who attended that disastrous first performance could have imagined that, more than one hundred years on, it would have evolved into one of the most enduringly popular and widely performed operas in the world.

The operas of Mieczyslaw Weinberg are being pulled out of obscurity. Until the 2010 Bregenz Festival, when director David Pountney placed the composer at the centre of the three-day event and staged an ambitious production of the The Passenger, none of his seven operas had ever been heard outside of Russia.