JACK Quartet is celebrating its 20th anniversary looking and acting too young to be true, and too busy in the present to look back at its past. This was signaled from the first moment of its Nov. 10 concert at the 92nd Street Y, which exploded … » Read

LONDON—When Jacques Offenbach died in 1880, he left a great deal of music for what would become known as his operatic magnum opus but rather fewer clues as to his final intentions. His musical executor, Ernest Guirard, set to work … » Read

Bryce Dessner was once best known as a member of rock band The National. These days, however, he’s equally respected as a classical composer. His latest project is Solos , an album of unaccompanied instrumental works written for a … » Read

LONDON—It’s relatively rare for two giants of the keyboard to perform piano duos, let alone tour with them internationally. Yuja Wang and Víkingur Ólafsson may be labelmates at Deutsche Grammophon, but this kind of star … » Read

In 2014, the Canadian/Israeli Azrieli Foundation launched the Azrieli Music Prize, a biannual competition to foster music composition. This year, the focus was on choral music and, at its tenth-anniversary gala on Oct. 28 in Montreal’s … » Read

Washington National Opera’s new Fidelio offers few surprises to anyone acquainted with director Francesca Zambello’s penchant for mild revisionism, or with recent stagings of the work elsewhere. As in the Met’s Jürgen Flimm … » Read

Good news for classical music lovers in the Bay Area, and elsewhere. Joshua Kosman, for 36 years the San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic until he retired this past April, is back. He can now be found at On a Pacific Aisle on Substack, … » Read

Il trovatore ’s dramaturgy has long drawn condescension. The Marx Brothers famously used Verdi’s opera to mock the entire genre; a recent article on the website Parterre Box decried its weakness of “dramatic continuity and … » Read

Appearances by Lisette Oropesa since the pandemic have been all too rare in New York, the city that once could have been considered her artistic home. By contrast, in Europe she recently has gone from success to success, with Alcina at Covent … » Read

CHICAGO— Taking over from any longtime music director can be a daunting task. Their identities can fuse with the organization, marking any successor as an interloper. That hasn’t been so much as a passing worry for Newberry Consort … » Read