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

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