As if to pay amends for its history as America’s largest slave-trading port, the City of Charleston will be the site of the world premiere of Omar , a new opera based on the 1831 autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, an enslaved Muslim African … » Read

Beijing’s municipal government has announced an initiative to grow its music and creative industries into a $17.2b economic juggernaut by 2025. Released on Dec. 31, the plan calls for promoting the growth of the city’s digital music … » Read

St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, burial place of J.S. Bach, was vandalized on New Year’s Eve when 25 panes of glass were smashed by rocks. Two stained-glass panels and more than 20 Art Nouveau panes were destroyed, according to Deutsche … » Read

With the launch of “Symphony in the City,” the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) has announced plans for four free concerts in distinctive venues around the city. As part of the BSO’s Beethoven 2020 project celebrating the … » Read

CAST (Community Arts Stabilization Trust), a San Francisco nonprofit that works to find affordable space for arts groups in the city, has announced plans to create a four-story community arts hub in the vacant 1907 Dempster Printing Building. … » Read

Having  denied the Sarasota Orchestra’s bid to build a new concert hall on seven acres of a 39-acre public park (favoring some well-organized tennis players’ opposition to it), the four Sarasota city commissioners are now asking … » Read

One man’s garbage can become another man’s inspiration. When Favio Chavez arrived at the Cateura landfill near Paraguay's capital of Asuncion, he was an environmental consultant intent on creating a recycling project. The project came … » Read

In a year-end roundup rife with local boosterism (the Los Angeles Philharmonic is “surely the most successful arts organization of the century"), Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed notes the town’s “near-contagious institutional … » Read

Calling the soon-to-end decade “transformative” for classical music, the Chicago Sun-Times points out a few highlights in more or less in chronological order. They begin—literally—with the arrival on September 19, 2010, of … » Read

Ivan Hewett, classical music critic for The Telegraph , doesn’t especially like the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s (VPO) New Year’s Day Concert, which reaches more than 60 million viewers in almost a hundred countries around … » Read