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

Given that health problems caused Mariss Jansons to cancel three European concerts only a week ago, it’s perhaps surprising that the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra put its ailing chief conductor on a plane for the States. As it was, his … » Read

It may have taken 35 years, but the Metropolitan Opera has finally gotten around to staging Akhnaten . Probably the most popular, certainly among the most readily comprehensible of Philip Glass’s 28 operas, it received its Met premiere on … » Read

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