CHICAGO—Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly why a night at the opera is so riveting, especially when it’s a contemporary opera, like Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking , which had its Lyric Opera of Chicago premiere Saturday. … » Read

MILAN--How to approach a piece like Schumann's Das Paradies und die Peri ? Written in 1843, Schumann described it as "well-nigh a new genre for the concert hall," but could not decide whether it was an opera or secular oratorio. Most critically, … » Read

While recording composer David Lang’s The Day and World to Come for a 2018 album, cellist Maya Beiser kept imagining a dancer emerging from the notes that she played. Last week, New York audiences got to see that dream come to fruition. The … » Read

For its 25 th -anniversary season, the Miró Quartet has come up with an intriguing idea. Rather than simply looking back at its own, albeit luminous, quarter century, the group is honoring its entire lineage, dating back to the first … » Read

On paper, The Turn of the Screw staged in and around an atmospheric country mansion sounds a compelling idea. Benjamin Britten’s masterly 1954 chamber opera after Henry James’s haunting 1898 ghost story of the same name is genuinely … » Read

The JACK Quartet is nothing if not eclectic. With a repertoire that ranges from Julia Wolfe and Helmut Lachenmann to Caroline Shaw and John Zorn, the group has a reputation for diverse, stimulating, and fearless programming that saw it named … » Read

LONDON—Anticipation skyrocketed at the prospect of Harrison Birtwistle’s magnum opus finally returning to the London Coliseum where David Freeman’s original production for ENO, by all accounts clear and austere, served it so … » Read

American Ballet Theatre's fall season at Lincoln Center’s Koch Theater offers a chance to see the company in mixed-repertoire programs—a pleasant alternative to the story ballets it brings to the Met Opera in spring. October 16 marked … » Read

For those who think of countertenor Iestyn Davies as the flamboyant castrato of Broadway’s recent Farinelli and the King , or as the high-pitched hypochondriac party guest in last year’s Met staging of Thomas Adès’s The … » Read

LOS ANGELES – While Esa-Pekka Salonen is going to the San Francisco Symphony next fall, he remains the conductor laureate of his longtime orchestra to the south, the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Indeed, whenever Salonen revisits the band … » Read