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

CARDIFF—Leonard Bernstein’s Candide is all about optimism, and a director needs an awful lot of it to attempt a successful production. The piece has had more revisions than Bernstein had hot dinners and given that some versions fill … » Read

CHICAGO—In April 1991 Georg Solti wrapped up his 22-year tenure as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with two blockbuster programs: a concert version of Verdi’s complete Otello with a cast headed by Luciano Pavarotti … » Read

SAN FRANCISCO—Ferruccio Busoni, Italian born but spiritually German, is one of the odder ducks in the great aviary of classical music. In his lifetime he was known primarily as a pianist, maybe the greatest since Liszt, but he provoked … » Read

LONDON—On November 3, 1973, a 20-year-old Oxbridge organ scholar by the name of Peter Phillips conducted a group of lay clerks (professional church singers) and choral scholars in a concert of Renaissance music in St. Mary Magdalen's … » Read

LONDON—With its chamber forces and whispered intimacies, Ariadne auf Naxos is tailor-made for country-house opera. The conceit, that a wealthy patron is putting on a work its composer fears will go over the heads of an audience here for the … » Read