CHICAGO— Taking over from any longtime music director can be a daunting task. Their identities can fuse with the organization, marking any successor as an interloper. That hasn’t been so much as a passing worry for Newberry Consort … » Read

First impressions matter. For 30-year-old Kedrick Armstrong , the new music director for the Oakland Symphony, the opening of the new season on Oct. 18, as described in the San Francisco Chronicle , “offered very promising signs.” … » Read

Ainadamar , Osvaldo Golijov’s elegy for the venerated Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca to a libretto by David Henry Huang, has had a healthy life following an artistically premature world premiere at Tanglewood in … » Read

Who would have thought that the opening of a concert space in a subterranean crypt would be a significant development on the New York music scene? Death of Classical, the organization that presents often-challenging programs in what it describes … » Read

LONDON—Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place has a reputation as a problem work. The sequel to his 1952 two-hander Trouble in Tahiti , it explores the repercussions of the turbulent marriage depicted in the earlier work. Badly received at … » Read

LONDON—Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw may be a masterpiece, but it’s a delicate one, especially with child abuse such a hot button issue today. The composer went about as far as anyone could in 1954 to foreground an … » Read

Two years remain before Gustavo Dudamel takes over as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 2026, and until then his podium appearances will be infrequent: for the current season, two weeks of subscription concerts plus a third for the … » Read

A visit by the London Philharmonic and its principal conductor Edward Gardner on Oct. 11 kicked off the 71 st season of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County with a program that featured Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky. [The orchestra comes to … » Read

Matthias Pintscher’s 25-minute tone poem neharot is quite explicitly a piece of program music, one that is governed by its external referent. Written in 2020, the piece is a response to the COVID-19 pandemic; the composer has described it … » Read

CHICAGO—It was not orchestral music as usual last week in downtown Chicago. Yes, the Chicago Symphony was in residence at Symphony Center Thursday and Friday with repertoire including a Chopin piano concerto and Shostakovich’s Fifth … » Read