Der Rosenkavalier  returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Friday evening (Dec. 13) bringing with it two World War I-vintage cannons implausibly positioned in the reception hall of a Viennese townhouse. It was producer Robert Carsen’s … » Read

Mozart was five when he started composing and for a decade his works were firmly in the style of contemporaries like Johann Christian Bach. At the other end of the spectrum is Erich Wolfgang Korngold whose compositional fingerprints were pretty … » Read

Anyone skeptical of overnight celebrity should bear in mind that before he was catapulted to fame and fortune in 2018 as “The Royal Wedding Cellist,” Sheku Kanneh-Mason had already become the first black artist to win the 2016 BBC … » Read

CHICAGO—Two years ago, when conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya signed on as music director for Chicago Opera Theater, she made her plans for the company very clear. A major goal was introducing audiences to new contemporary operas and neglected … » Read

MILAN—St. Ambrose’s Day stands solidly on Europe’s cultural, social, and political calendar, marking the feast day of Milan’s patron saint, and the annual opening the city’s venerated opera house. Historically, the … » Read

Now in its sixth season, Heartbeat Opera has gained a reputation for radical adaptations and rearrangements that have sometimes boiled down standard works to around 90 minutes, in an effort to get closer to the essence of what they are about. To … » Read

A film director, dressed in jeans, a hoody, and a blazer, paces the stage. The wings are exposed. Freestanding lights frame the dancers, posed in a tableau. The director circles the group, opening and closing a clapperboard. With each click, a … » Read

British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor was 11 when he won the 2004 BBC Young Musician of the Year and a mere 19 when he made his Proms debut playing Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto, thrilling the crowd with Morton Gould’s Boogie Woogie … » Read

PARIS—Pre-revolutionary Russia teemed with hereditary princes. The dramatis personae of War and Peace lists a dozen but there were hundreds more, not to mention counts and barons, most of them materially entitled as well as nominally … » Read

Elijah Moshinsky’s grand staging from 1995 of The Queen of Spades , which was conducted by Valery Gergiev in his first Russian assignment at the Metropolitan Opera, exemplified the company’s commitment to Russian opera following the … » Read