An introduction to Bachtrack and how to use it

Bachtrack connects you to live performances of classical music, opera, ballet and dance across the world, both in the future (by our extensive listings of upcoming performances) and in the past (by our archive of reviews, to which we add between 100 and 150 per month).

Bachtrack.com has been built up steadily since its launch in 2008. Its scale is now huge, with 26 289 reviews from 56 countries, supplemented by 1 966 feature articles and interviews. We believe that our database of upcoming live events is the most extensive in the world: in 2025, we listed 31 597 performances in 52 countries.

As well as the site's core of event listings, reviews and articles, we also provide a news feed, listings of festivals and videos and many individual “About” pages: anything on the site is likely to have its own About page (a composer, an artist, a city or many other items). Everything is heavily cross-linked: the intention is that the site should be a “garden of delights” in which you can wander at will.

Here are some of the things that make us different.

• We are truly international - As well as our English language coverage, we cover substantial numbers of events in French, German and Spanish. As well as performances in the UK and US, we list and review events in the major houses in Europe and far beyond, from Canada to Chile, from Japan to New Zealand.
• We write at full length - In a world where newspaper and magazine coverage of classical music is shrinking in length and frequency, our concert reviews are typically 400-600 words, or 600-800 for opera and dance.
• We maintain the highest quality of writing - Our reviewers are passionate and knowledgeable. Many have extensive experience in music writing, performance or academia; some are hand picked younger writers. Whoever the writer, every article and review is edited professionally to strict editorial standards.

This guide will show you how to get the best out of Bachtrack, whether you're an expert or a novice, in search of something very specific or just browsing. We'll start with some ideas for different ways to approach the site, and follow that with a guide to each of the major features.

Finding what's on in a particular place and/or time

Suppose you're an opera fan going to Berlin in the summer. Use Bachtrack's "What's on page" (or the search bar on the home page) to find the events that are on. If you only want to see opera, leave out the concert and dance results. If you're only after particular composers (Verdi? Wagner?), narrow the search to them. If you know your exact dates, narrow your search for those. If you're passing by another city on your way to Berlin, add it in.

Full instructions for using the search bar are shown below.

Without Bachtrack, of course, you could look up the list of opera houses in Berlin and go to each of their websites in turn, navigating each event calendar to get to March. But Bachtrack makes it so much easier...

Get the in-depth view of what you're going to see

Let's suppose that you've found a listing with a conductor or pianist you haven't heard of (however expert you are, there will be many up-and-coming artists you haven't had a chance to see yet). Click on their name and there's a fair chance that we've already reviewed them somewhere.

The same goes for a piece of music you don't know - with the addition, for an increasing number of the most important works, of an "About a work" article, in which we quiz an artist (typically an orchestra member or a singer) about what makes the work special.

If you're not so sure about what you're looking for, we also publish playlists to give you a taster of a composer, genre or theme.

Planning a trip

Perhaps you are visiting more than just Berlin and you're planning a trip to Europe where you'll go to multiple cities and/or festivals to take in your most cherished music (we have users from the United States and Australia who do this every year).

You can do a search simultaneously for events in, say, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Italy, spanning whatever you think are the most likely dates for your trip. Try different combinations of countries, and dates to find clusters of performances that catch your eye. Or start by narrowing it down to an artist, piece of music or concert hall that you just don't want to miss.

If you're short of inspiration, try our Travel and festivals page for places to visit, both mainstream and off the beaten track.

Follow your favourite artists as they travel round the globe

Are you a fan of Anna Netrebko? Klaus Mäkelä? Patricia Kopatchinskaja? Search for them in the event finder to see what, where and when they're playing. Better still, use our My favourites facility and we'll alert you when we list one of their performances, often many months before it happens. You can choose the alert to be set for everywhere, or limit it to your "Favourite places", such as your home town or a place to which you can travel easily.

Ensuring you don't miss a performance of a less played piece

Perhaps there's a piece you've always wanted to see that just isn't played all that often. Who knows: perhaps Attila is your favourite Verdi opera (“Mentre gonfiarsi l’anima” is one of the all time great bass arias, according to Ferruccio Furlanetto). Use My favourites to set an alert for it – you'll know when it's coming as soon as we do.

The simplest way to start is to go to the What's on page (the phone button is labelled "Events"), and click on one of the featured cities to see events in that city. The What's on page also contains a search bar to let you search for just about anything you want (the same search bar is on each of the home pages for the four languages) - a composer, a work, a performer, a city, a concert hall, an opera company, even an instrument or a genre of music.

Once you see a production you like, you click on its More info button to get full details

If they are a house who partner with Bachtrack, the red Buy tickets button will take you to their site, where you can book your tickets.

Using the search bar

Type the first three letters of the thing you're searching for into the search bar, and wait for it to come up with some results. For example:

• bee will come up with Beethoven followed by a bunch of his works
• mil will come up with the city of Milan, followed by La Scala, followed by a bunch of composers and performer called "Miles", "Miller", etc
• fra will come up with the France (country), most probably followed by Île-de-France (the region that includes Paris) and then Franz Schubert

If there are too many results, you can add more letters to narrow down the search: for example, if you wanted San Francisco, you probably want to expand from fra to franci at least. You can also add parts of extra words, so, for example, if you're looking for the San Francisco Opera, franci op is a good string to try.

Once your list of results is in place, you can click on one of them to see the future event listings which match the item that you found. If they have a house icon on the right, clicking on it will bring up the item's individual About page.

Narrowing down your search

Once you have your first set of results, you can narrow them down by adding additional search terms. For example, let's suppose you've started with bee and selected the Symphony no. 5 in C minor, Op.67. The chances are that there will be many results, including many that are on the wrong side of the Atlantic from where you are. So if you want to see results in Germany, it might make sense for you to click on the Filter button, type ger into the Add another search term box and select the ensuing item Germany in the results dialog. Click on Do the search and you will reach a page of concerts in Germany whose programme includes the Fifth.

The filter dialog also allows you to specify start and end dates for your search. However, please note that you will be unable to search for listings in the past.

Note that when you've modified your search, the URL in your browser's address bar will be updated to reflect the modified search, so you can bookmark it if you wish.

Expanding your search

You can search simultaneously for several things of the same kind. For example, let's suppose your favourite composers are Verdi, Puccini and Mozart. If you add search terms for all three of these, you can see all the matching listings in a single set of results.

Free text search

Most Bachtrack searches will be made for an item in the database like a composer, work or city. However, some things just need a free text search: for example, if you're looking for concerts featuring competition prizewinners, a free text search for winner might be a good bet.

To do this, type in your search string and then click on the magnifying glass icon at the far right of the search bar.

Reading full details of a listing

When you are interested by an entry in your search results and want to know more about it, click on its More info button. This brings you to a full page version of a listing, which contains anything we know about it.

Note that the amount of information is generally greater for a listing whose promoter has partnered with Bachtrack (which we call a "Premium listing"). Most notably, premium listings have a red Buy tickets link to take you to the promoter's website for ticket purchase; they may also contain a long form text description, an image and/or a festival indicator.

As well as giving you full information about the event, the full page listing is a nerve centre from which you can click onto many pages relevant to this listing. The most important links are shown in blue, but mousing over (on a desktop browser) or trial and error (on a phone) will show you that many other text items.

Most of the links go to the About page for the particular item: for example, clicking on a venue takes you to a home page for the venue, clicking on a composer takes you to a home page for the composer, etc.

Items in the listing sidebar and footer

To the right hand side of the main listing body (on a desktop browser) and in the area underneath it, you will find useful links related to the listing. For example:

• Other events at the same venue
• Other places to see a particular opera
• If we've reviewed this production (presumably mid way through a run), a link to the review
• If we've reviewed an opera with the same director, either in the same house or when co-produced at a different house, links to those reviews.
• A link to an "About a work" article that we've published about one of the works in the programme.

Everything has an About page

Most items on the site – countries, venues, cities, composers, works, performers, instruments and many more – have their own individual About pages.

An item's About page brings together upcoming events, recent reviews, available videos and/or articles tagged with the item. The majority of the About pages are generated automatically by the system, but some items – for example the most searched for cities, or those for an orchestra, opera company, city or festival that is partnering with us – have customised About pages with a wealth of other content such as articles, biographical text, videos, images, a "fact file" and so on.

Think of the About page for an item as a central point of reference from which you can access everything about it.

Things to remember

Listings with multiple dates

When there are more than one performance of the same thing at the same venue within a reasonably short period (most typically, an opera or dance production, or a concert given twice over a week-end), the system condenses the search result into a single listing with multiple dates.

However, a listing never has more than one venue. So if the a concert with the same artists and programme is touring to different cities, there will be a separate listing for each concert hall on the tour.

If your network is slow...

The search should be take no more than a few seconds on a good WiFi network, but bear in mind that it could be a lot slower if you're on a poor mobile connection. Please be patient!

What "Performer" might mean

By the way, the system uses the word "Performer" to refer to any of the following:

• An individual musician, singer or other artist
• For opera or dance, a member of the production team (director, set designer, choreographer, etc)
• An orchestra, choir, quartet or other ensemble
• An opera or dance company

Clicking on Reviews in the main menu (or the orange button on a phone) will get you to a list of the most recent reviews. You will also see a search bar which works in the same way as the search bar for listings, with some notable exceptions:

• The date filters in the review search bar count backwards in time, and you can only look for dates in the past, whereas the date filters in the listing search bar are the opposite
• The review search bar lets you specify the name of an author of the reviews

The menu for reviews allows you to specify a particular category or categories (e.g. Opera or Dance), or you you can use the filter box to do so.

Like full page listings, the review page contains various items in the sidebar and footer that we think are relevant to the main content of the review, for example other pieces written by the same author. A particularly useful item is a link to the original listing of the event reviewed, with full details of cast and programme: you are permitted to view these listings even though they're in the past.

Searching for reviews in multiple languages

Just above the search results for reviews, you will see a tick box labelled "Put content in English at top" (or whatever language your page is in). Normally, we expect you to be searching for reviews in your chosen language, so you'll want to see those at the top of the results, so the box is ticked by default.

However, if you want to search for results in all languages – either because you're bilingual or because you're happy to use machine translation – just untick the box: the page will refresh accordingly.

The Articles page works in a very similar way to the reviews page, although its search bar is considerably simplified.

Rather than the Category of Concert/Opera/Dance, the article finder has an Article category, with entries such as Feature/Interview/Opinion/ etc.

The same tick box is provided for choosing your languages as for the review finder.

News items

The News pages work in a similar way to the Articles pages: we separate out news stories from the main article finder, because we are often reproducing information sent to us in a press release rather than creating a fully researched article.

As well as live events, we list hundreds of videos that you can watch on your computer or phone. These can be live streams (viewable at a particular date and time), on-demand (viewable whenever you want) or sometimes both live-streamed and also available for you to watch at leisure (often after a few days' gap for post-production and editing).

The search bar works in the same way as the one for live events, with the addition of a set of extra buttons for things like "watch today" and "ending soon".

If we reviewed the performance that was filmed (or sometimes another performance in the same run), the review is incorporated into the listing page under the heading Bachtrack was there! In a small number of cases (mostly during the pandemic), we reviewed the video itself.

Travel and festivals

Our Travel and festivals page is there to whet your appetite for classical music travel. It brings together a selection of articles about faraway places with great music, and incorporates a finder for festivals around the world who partner with us.

Young Artists and competitions

Our Guide to young artists and competitions assembles articles and reviews about young artists and the academies and competitions that they attend. We particularly recommend our yearly "Young artists to watch" series.

The page also links to seach pages for competitions and masterclasses, both live and on video.

Phone v desktop

The site content is as close to identical as we can reasonably make it on a phone or a desktop browser. There are, inevitably, some differences:

• On a phone, you'll be navigating between the most important sections (Events, Reviews, Articles, Video) from four large buttons near the top of the screen. On a desktop, you'll be using the grey menu bar. The full menus are there on the phone if you need them.
• Many links are identifiable by being coloured in blue. But some pages contain so many links that this would be difficult to read. On a desktop, you'll be able to tell by hovering your mouse over the text. On a phone, you'll have to guess.

The full menu of all site functions is under the More button on a desktop, or the hamburger icon at the top right of the page on a phone.

In the rest of this guide, we'll often use the phrase "click on". On a phone or tablet, that obviously means "tap on", but we didn't want to clutter the document by using "click/tap on" every time.

Language

We provide content in four languages: English, French, German and Spanish. The content varies by language: the listings are the same, but with the names of composers, works, places and many other items; we translate some of our most important articles and reviews. The site home page is hand-curated for each language, so its content varies considerably from one language to another.

The site will try to pick the best language for you based on your browser settings. If that's not what you want, change it by clicking on the two-letter language indicator at the top of the page next to the person icon.

Signing in

We strongly recommend that you become a registered user, for reasons that benefit both us and you.

• For us: we are funded wholly by advertising, which means that it's essential for us to be able to tell our advertisers how many people visit the site – which is massively easier and more accurate if you sign in. Since we don't receive grant funding or sell anyone's data, we really need this for the site to continue operating. (For the same reason, we really appreciate it if you can bear to tick the box to allow non-essential cookies).

• For you: we provide a selection of great features (we think they're great, anyway) which only work if you sign in. See Features available when you're signed in below for details.

How to register and/or sign in

Start by clicking on the white "person" icon at the top left of the header on your screen. This will pop up a dialog asking you to give your email address. If you're already registered, you have a choice of signing in using a password, or a "magic link" sent to you by email. If you haven't, you'll be given a form in which to type in a password and some other details.

Your sign-in is recorded in a cookie, which means that if you're in the same browser on the same machine, you won't have to sign in again for one hour. If you've signed in with a password, the "remember me" box allows you to extend this time to 90 days (limited to 3 days if you're a contributor to the site). Please don't tick the "remember me" box if you're on a public computer, which would give random outsiders access to your account.

The registration wall

We also encourage you to sign in by limiting the number of articles, reviews and full listing pages that you read as a non-signed-in user (at time of writing, the number is 5). A number of pages are exempt from the registration wall:

• Pages you've already viewed on this browser
• Pages reached from a link in a newsletter sent within the last 7 days.
• Sponsored articles

Other pages such as About pages and search results are not subject to this quota.

Please note that this is a registration wall, not a paywall. Access to the site remains free.

Your profile page

When you're signed in, the "person" icon changes so that it pops up a menu to access some of the features listed above, as well as providing a link to your profile page, where you can see and/or modify the information we hold about you (it's also the place to go if you want us to delete your account).

Other ways to access the sign-in dialog

As well as the "person" dialog, the sign-in dialog can be reached from a pop-up at the bottom of the screen. It can also be reached when you click on a feature which requires sign-in (for example, Add to wishlist), or if you are viewing a page that is only visible to signed in users and you have signed out since you last viewed it.

• My Favourites - If you have favourite artists, companies, orchestras, works or cities and venues that you live in or visit frequently, you can set up alerts to be delivered when we add new live events that match. For example, if you live in Australia but frequently travel to Berlin and want to know when events are on at the Philharmonie, you can set up an alert just for that. Or if you are a fan of Nadine Sierra and want to know when her concerts and operas are announced we can let you know this, too.

• My Future Events When scrolling through our event listings, you can add it to your Wish List using the button on the listing itself. These will appear as a personalised list in the My Future Events area, which you can use to remind yourself to book and as a diary.

• My Past Events Once you have been to an event, it will appear in your My Past Events list as a reminder of the things you’ve seen. On past event listings, you can add your own private star rating, summary and comments about the event.

• Comments Signing in also allows you to comment on most articles on the site.

• Previous searches When you are logged in, the site will remember your most recent searches made in our What’s on section so that you have quick access to the things that most interest you.

And, of course, there's our Newsletter

Each Friday, we open the treasure trove of content on our site and choose a personal selection of the best bits for our free weekly newsletter.

Our editors curate a selection of recent reviews and interesting articles, the best live-streamed or on-demand concerts, opera and ballet coming up, and for those who provide their country or nearest city, suggestions for opera, ballet and concerts to attend in the next week.

Once a month, we also send out newsletters in French, German and Spanish, which focus on events, articles and reviews in French-, German- and Spanish-speaking regions respectively.