LONDON—The U.K. is well served when it comes to contemporary music, but any list of the most stimulating practitioners would have to put Riot Ensemble pretty near the top. Winners of the 2020 Ernst von Siemens Ensemble Prize, its … » Read

The intrepid Igor Levit offered two mammoth sets of piano variations in his January 22 Carnegie Hall recital. It was a physically ambitious program: both Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will … » Read

The Cleveland Orchestra’s (almost) annual appearances are Carnegie Hall high points, and its two sold-out concerts last week were no exception. Under the leadership Franz Welser-Möst, music director since 2002 and now in his … » Read

SAN FRANCISCO—In a well-designed recital that moved from Francis Poulenc settings of Federico Garcia Lorca’s knife-edged poetry and the death-haunted meditations of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe to a sampler of songs of … » Read

The four-performance run of What to Wear, the music-theater piece defying conventional expectations of narrative clarity, was sold out. On viewing its New York premiere, by the PROTOTYPE Festival January 15 at BAM’s Harvey Theater, its … » Read

LONDON--Hot on the heels of Katie Mitchell’s interventionist take on Janácek’s The Makropulos Case for the Royal Ballet and Opera, audiences were treated to a January 13 concert performance at the Barbican Centre. Part of the … » Read

In recent years Samuel Barber’s Vanessa has been enjoying a renascence. Premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958, the opera won a Pulitzer Prize for Music that year and was also performed at the Salzburg Festival. But by the 1960s, the … » Read

Music lies at the core of Hildegard , the new opera that arrived in New York on January 9, the first of four PROTOTYPE Festival performances. Sarah Kirkland Snider, its composer, wrote the libretto with the aim of developing the music and text … » Read

LONDON—Alfred Brendel’s passing in 2025 robbed the world of one of the great 20th-century pianists and a truly original creative artist who impacted the careers of contemporaries and students alike. Czech-born in 1931, though mostly … » Read

Bellini’s I puritani is a musical feast, as the cast of the Met’s new staging, seen at its New Year’s Eve premiere, amply demonstrated. But it is by no means an exemplary piece of musical drama, which this production, by … » Read