COOPERSTOWN, NY—For its first ever production of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet (seen July 15 th ) the Glimmerglass Festival turned to Simon Godwin, artistic director of Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company. The Washington … » Read

Bel canto opera has fallen well out of the mainstream of New York’s operatic life. In times gone by, the Met and New York City Opera would regularly mount works by Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini for stars like Beverly Sills and Joan … » Read

LONDON—It may be a typically gray British summer, but at least the BBC Proms are shining brightly. And if anyone needs convincing that classical music can still draw a crowd, they need look no further than this July 18 Prom at … » Read

COOPERSTOWN, NY—The Glimmerglass Festival, located in a decidedly rural area of upstate New York, began rather humbly in 1975 with four performances of La Bohème in a high school auditorium. That opera returned this summer to open … » Read

LONDON—How to fathom the unknowable? Gustav Mahler is one of history’s most complex and contradictory personalities, a man disarmingly naïve, intellectually profound, blunt to the point of rudeness, dictatorial, … » Read

Be ready for anything from a new Ted Hearne piece. Many of those in the free-of-charge audience at the Caramoor Summer Music Festival’s July 9 performance of Farming— the accomplished new work by this fearless, outspoken … » Read

Summertime pickings at Lincoln Center once again are slim, as the organization persists in efforts to cultivate an ever-more diverse audience. The Lincoln Center Festival is now a distant memory, and the Mostly Mozart Festival will be formally … » Read

Schubert: A Musical Wayf arer, a new biography by Lorraine Byrne Bodley, serves as a major corrective to the widely held mythology surrounding the life of a prodigious composer who died at only 31 years of age. Schubert, writes Ivan Hewett, chief … » Read

SAN FRANCISCO—The San Francisco’s Symphony’s musically polyglot, politically inflected June 30 program at Davies Hall opened with striking pre-performance remarks by composer Reena Esmail. By way of introduction to her Black … » Read

LONDON—Inspired by Nawal El Saadawi’s novel of the same name, Bushra El-Turk’s multimedia opera Woman at Point Zero is powerful, poignant, and frequently painful. Seven years in development, it received its U.K. premiere on June … » Read