Teodor Currentzis and his musicAeterna chorus and orchestra made their belated North American debut last week with the Verdi Requiem. For more than a decade, the Greek-Russian conductor has won considerable acclaim in his homeland and throughout … » Read

SAN FRANCISCO—Across the street from San Francisco Symphony’s concert presentation of the first act of Die Walküre , a different opera about a pair of siblings on the run from danger appeared on the San Francisco Opera stage. … » Read

For all the fame and fortune of one and the relative obscurity of the other, Kurt Weill and Marc Blitzstein make natural bedfellows. By the time that Weill, the doyen of left-wing Weimar-era music theater, had morphed into the Broadway composer … » Read

LONDON—The Barbican Center got two dudes for the price of one during a three-night residency by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Gustavo Dudamel kicked off on Nov. 18 with the London premiere of John Adams’s piano concerto Must the Devil … » Read

It is not unheard of for the singer of King Marke to win highest honors in a performance of Tristan und Isolde  It happened in 1981 when Matti Salminen made his Metropolitan Opera debut in James Levine’s first performance of the opera … » Read

LONDON—It’s fourth time lucky in English National Opera’s Orpheus season. In the operas of Gluck , Offenbach , and Birtwistle a trio of unsatisfactory stagings diverted attention from some fine all-round musicianship, so it has … » Read

Chicago has a long and intimate relationship with Prokofiev. He made his  Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut as conductor composer, and soloist early as 1918, and Chicago was the first American city to hear music from his new ballet Romeo and … » Read

Annie-B Parson is the queen of gesture. The artistic director and co-founder of Big Dance Theater, she has an innate ability to layer seemingly random and pedestrian movements with textual references to create works that are at once funny, … » Read

What do contemporary composers Matthew Aucoin, Hannah Lash, Jonathan Bailey Holland, and Hilary Purrington have in common? The answer is New England, and in particular its universities, as American Composers Orchestra’s November 13 … » Read

Once one of the bad boys of British music, James MacMillan—now Sir James MacMillan—still regularly manages to raise an eyebrow or two. His outspoken views on politics (he’s a committed socialist) and religion (he’s a … » Read