The Independent joins 1,800 opera-goers on a freezing English beach as Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes competes with the crash of the waves and the whistling wind. The result? Spectacular

Death in Venice, Coliseum, London

Paul Higgins's staging of Madama Butterfly is not easy to watch, and nor should it be.

Although on a label that aims to capture the intimacy and electricity of live performance, only two items in Pérez's seductive programme of French and Spanish song with pianist Ian Burnside were recorded in concert, and they are the corkers: "Je suis encor tout étourdie" and "Adieu, notre petit table" from Massenet's Manon.

The challenge which every designer of opera at Holland Park must meet is that posed by the country-house façade, which constitutes a pre-existing and non-negotiable set. 

Expectant mothers who give birth on the same day as the Duchess of Cambridge can expect an extra delivery - an album of lullabies by soprano Hayley Westenra.

Woman's Hour presenter Jenni Murray has announced that she will be conducting the BBC Philharmonic orchestra - despite not being able to read music.

Why do all female classical musicians have to be thin and sexy?

It was in many ways appropriate that Aldeburgh’s Britten-centenary festival should open with a concert performance of Peter Grimes.

Garsington's 'Maometto secondo' is risibly directed but superlatively sung 

On the eve of his Aldeburgh concerts, the pianist tells Michael Church why he loves to wind up the traditionalists and critics

If only the latest opera from Philip Glass had a squeak of the wit, drama and character of the great animator's creations

The second volume in the Belcea Quartet's Beethoven Cycle extends from the pastoralia of the third and fifth Opus 18 quartets to the tortured interior manifesto of the Grosse Fuge.

Written within two years of each other, and both set in dirt-poor villages in southern Italy, the twin peaks of operatic verismo employ similar methods to reach similar aesthetic goals.

For Olivier Messiaen, birds were ‘the most outstanding musicians on our planet’, and it was typical of his serene imperviousness to brute reality that, while Paris burned around him in 1944, he should garland the themes of his supreme piano work with birdsong.