Musicalizing difficult subject matter can pose tough challenges. These two recordings are good examples of when composers get it right. Songs in Flight Shawn E. Okpebholo’s Songs in Flight was inspired by Freedom on the Move, a database … » Read

LOS ANGELES—Carlos Simon’s Good News Mass , a de facto 50-minute symphonic gospel service combining aspects of the Catholic Mass and Pentecostal fervor, had its world premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall on April 17. A co-commission … » Read

Classical and contemporary music can make for awkward bedfellows, but these two recent recordings show how one genre can really illuminate the another. Schubert/Beatles draws unpredicted parallels between the father of the German Lied and the … » Read

CHICAGO— In the 1990s, no less an eminence than Alfred Brendel urged Twyla Tharp to choreograph Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Why? “It’s so funny,” he reportedly told the contemporary ballet dancemaker. Funny? … » Read

The Danish String Quartet has forged a specialty of assembling programs that bring composers from separate eras into conversation with each other. The five-part Prism series (2019-2023) grouped one each of Beethoven’s late quartets with … » Read

SAN FRANCISCO—The concert began with a bang, visual as well as aural. An enormous sculpted bronze head bristling with raised bronze tabs [pictured], by Japanese artist Jun Kaneko, descended from above to a narrow runway stage, where it was … » Read

LONDON—The program was billed “Oramo conducts Vaughan Williams,” and so he did, but the real reason this April 11 concert at London’s Barbican Centre created a buzz was the chance to hear a rediscovery by 20th-century … » Read

Any review of Das Rheingold that begins with the critic expressing relief that the production features “good helmets, with very good horns” might suggest that the musical performance itself left something to be desired. Fortunately, … » Read

Czech conductor Jakub Hruša, rising star and music director-designate of London’s Royal Opera, teamed up with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja for her New York Philharmonic debut on April 9. On the bill were a warhorse, a world … » Read

CHICAGO—Contemporary opera’s golden duo has done it again. Teammates since 2012’s Song from the Uproar , composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek have created their most ambitious work yet with The Listeners , based on … » Read