Classical

Wexford festival’s operatic rarities

Verdi’s Le Trouvère, transported to the Spanish civil war, is just one of the powerfully sung surprises at the Irish waterfront party

Benjamin Britten’s oddball masterpiece

Albert Herring is a subversive portrait of stuffy postwar England

Misogyny and misinformation in a 21st-century Handel

Mob rule and a marauding bear feature in sparkling revivals of two of the composer’s lesser-known gems. Plus, a masterclass in high-speed Rossini

Garland – a horse, a car park, and a night of pure imagination

The young composer’s inventive new work at Peckham’s Bold Tendencies is unlike anything but itself. Plus, an epic Verdi boasts a starry cast

Anna Netrebko electrifies in a controversial Tosca

Music and politics meet in a stripped-back Puccini in Jakub Hrůsä’s ROH debut

Anton Bruckner’s divisive legacy

A capacity Albert Hall crowd made their way through tube strike London to see the composer's unfinished Symphony No 9

Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District – satire at the opera

Cue poisoned mushrooms and fierce satire as the BBC Phil and ENO join forces in Shostakovich’s denounced opera

Lucerne’s musical bonanza

Simon Rattle conducts the Swiss festival’s dazzling orchestra in his debut appearance

An elegy for Ukraine

At the hour of Trump and Putin’s Alaska summit, Shostakovich’s Babi Yar proved a poignant choice at the Proms. Plus, Studio Ghibli’s composer Joe Hisaishi, and thrills at Grimeborn

Mahler’s world in sound

The composer’s Symphony No 3 has a universal – and anxiety-inducing – quality vividly brought to life at the Proms

How to bring a symphony to life

The Aurora Orchestra performs entire symphonies by heart. Its collaboration with Frantic Assembly blends theatre, dance and music to make classical accessible to all

The restless poetry of Kát’a Kabanová

A divisive staging of Janáček’s domestic opera rounds off Glyndebourne festival by trapping the audience in the mind of its unhappy heroine

Was that eight-hour choral epic on a beanbag worth it?

John Tavener’s monumental Veil of the Temple promises to take us on a journey to a sacred, spiritual realm

A singalong Dido and Aeneas

Audience participation was key to this spirited production at Longborough festival opera

A spectacular series of firsts at the Proms

A trio of world premieres saw this season begin in bravura style

Mark Simpson: ‘When I perform I’m like a shaman’

The composer on transcending reality, and his working-class background, through classical music

Leonard Bernstein’s opera of suburbia

Plus: Strauss’s ever-shocking masterpiece Salome brings the London Symphony Orchestra season at the Barbican to a close

A spectacular staging of The Flying Dutchman

Wagner’s great work sails into the modern age in the strangest of venues: a massive working quarry near Vienna