SALZBURG, Austria—The Salzburg Festival offers events in such profusion that each day can seem like a mini-festival in itself. With 179 performances (plus 34 more in its youth program) over 43 days, each day of the 2023 festival—the … » Read

LONDON--Composed in 1887, Ruddigore has suffered by comparison, sandwiched as it was between box office hits The Mikado and The Yeomen of the Guard . And whereas Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas generally won popular acclaim by skewering the … » Read

If Orfeo [reviewed yesterday] offered a return-to-origins story about the power of opera—and of live performance, imperiled on so many fronts—Santa Fe’s Tosca , viewed August 1, sought to open up some fresh angles on a wildly … » Read

SANTA FE, NM—Though its first performance was in 1607, L’Orfeo is filling the new-commission slot for this summer’s Santa Fe Opera season. The company asked Nico Muhly, whose own operas have been staged by the Met, to … » Read

LENOX, Mass.—This year’s five-day Festival of Contemporary Music (FCM) at Tanglewood proved dramatically that plenty of women are not only composing music but performing and conducting it with skill and panache. In addition, the … » Read

LONDON—A puzzled silence fell over the Royal Albert Hall after the premiere of Kafka’s Earplugs , a BBC commission by Irish composer Gerald Barry. But not for long: “That was rubbish!” shouted one man from the center … » Read

All albums are unique, but some have the power to draw the listener into a very special sound world, like this trio of deftly curated new releases on three of America’s most innovative independent record labels. Take Ennanga , the solo … » Read

NORTH ADAMS, MA—Venerable composer Joan Tower was pleased, if somewhat nonplussed, to find herself at the annual Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art). It would seem an unusual context for this … » Read

LONDON—What to do when the star is a no-show? This July 30 BBC Prom at London’s Royal Albert Hall was to have featured Daniil Trifonov playing Mason Bates’s Piano Concerto. Alas, the Russian pianist cancelled at perilously short … » Read

For many classical music lovers, the music of Arnold Schoenberg exemplifies the chasm that evolved between composer and listener during the first half of the 20 th century. Born into a lower middle-class Jewish family in Vienna in 1874, … » Read