When John Adams’s Girls of the Golden West  premiered in November 2017, a great deal of ink was spilt arguing about form and function. Did Peter Sellars’s libretto, culled from diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and mining … » Read

LONDON—Garsington Opera has been snapping at the artistic heels of Glyndebourne Festival of late, delivering an impressive string of hits, many of them daring rarities . This year saw the completion of phase one of the £14.5 million … » Read

LONDON—While Bernstein’s Candide (1956) is a musical that aspires to be an operetta, Franz Léhar’s Die Lustige Witwe (1905) looks in the opposite direction. Operetta, musical… what’s in a name? It’s a … » Read

The Metropolitan Opera made partial amends for the absence from its stage this season of two outstanding female singers previously active there, soprano Lisette Oropesa and mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca. The two were featured in two Carnegie Hall … » Read

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s recent concert at London’s Barbican Center left one veteran music critic yearning for some “real musical satisfaction.” In a program that tried to do too much, writes Ian Hewitt in The … » Read

LONDON—The 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings offered plenty of opportunities here in the U.K to hear Elgar’s Nimrod , a piece of music regularly associated with national remembrance. Equally inviting was a chance to hear it in … » Read

OJAI, CA—Since the 1980s, the Ojai Festival has had a different music director every year, with only the artistic director remaining in place year-round (currently it’s Ara Guzelimian). As a result there have been wide swings in … » Read

Once the rock star of the avant-garde, the blonde, charismatic Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) has been fading toward invisibility in the U.S. The Park Avenue Amory's presentation of Inside Light, taken from the composer's gargantuan cycle of … » Read

On June 7 in David Geffen Hall, Jaap van Zweden conducted the second of three performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 ( Resurrection ), his swansong as music director of the New York Philharmonic. (He conducts the orchestra again presently … » Read

SAN FRANCSICO—With the downstage platform of Davies Hall cleared for the Alonzo King LINES Ballet dancers in the first half of the program and a Peter Sellars-directed monodrama in the second, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen appeared to be … » Read