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

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

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

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

DETROIT—The lively but radical new production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte , seen at its April 5 premiere at the Detroit Opera House, presupposes that the opera is inherently misogynistic. From a surface reading of Lorenzo da … » Read

LONDON—In these straitened times, every first night at the Wales Millennium Centre is a cause for muted celebration. “We’re still here,” Welsh National Opera seems to chorus, from its virtuosic pit musicians who long ago … » Read