Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, kicking off the second leg of a  Korea-Japan tour, greeted Tokyo with a novelty and two warhorses. The June 3 Suntory Hall concert, conducted by NACO Music Director Alexander Shelley, opened … » Read

LONDON—When The Soldier’s Tale premiered in 1918, it was admired not just for Stravinsky’s pungent score and idiosyncratic orchestration but for the innovative way it blended spoken narrative with a suite of baroque-inflected … » Read

CHICAGO—It’s become one of the most frequently repeated stories in classical music. In 1933, Florence Price became the first Black woman to have a piece played by a major American symphony orchestra—the Chicago Symphony. But the … » Read

CHICAGO—The inaugural performance of She Who Dared Tuesday night, a powerful new opera by composer Jasmine Arielle Barnes and librettist Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, was not your usual world premiere. The cast of Chicago Opera Theater's  … » Read

SAN FRANCISCO—On the afternoon of June 1, Opera Parallèle’s production of Harvey Milk Reimagined was nearly upstaged by vintage news footage of the man himself, the San Francisco lawmaker and gay activist murdered by fellow … » Read

Gustavo Dudamel’s appearances with the New York Philharmonic this season, apart from its Spring Gala and Concerts in the Parks series, amount to three subscription programs. Of these, the main event for those seeking insights into what a … » Read

LEIPZIG, Germany—When Dmitri Shostakovich died in 1975, the world lost one of the last composers whose work regularly touched the souls of listeners beyond the usual classical music crowd. Fifty years on, that is reason enough to celebrate … » Read

LONDON—A nagging concern ahead of Glyndebourne’s new Parsifal arose because a decade ago the company’s current artistic director, Stephen Langridge, staged a production for The Royal Opera that badly misread the opera. He … » Read

For flashes of Zen insight, George Balanchine’s collected sayings rival or surpass Yogi Berra’s. Did the founding choreographer of the New York City Ballet truly once propose that all ballets should be called Swan Lake because then … » Read

SAN FRANCISCO—The traditional 19 th -century view of the concerto, at least to a first approximation, pits the soloist against the orchestra in a battle of wills. Later generations, though, ginned up a variety of different dramatic … » Read